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Volume 1 of
The Marble Faun
Or The Romance of Monte Beni
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
May, 2000 [Etext #2181]
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THE MARBLE FAUN
or The Romance of Monte Beni
Nathaniel Hawthorne
In Two Volumes
This is Volume One
Contents
Volume I
I MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
II THE FAUN
III SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
IV THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
V MIRIAM'S STUDIO
VI THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
VII BEATRICE
VIII THE SUBURBAN VILLA
IX THE FAUN AND NYMPH
X THE SYLVAN DANCE
XI FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
XII A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
XIII A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
XIV CLEOPATRA
XV AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
XVI A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
XVII MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
XVIII ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
XIX THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
XX THE BURIAL CHANT
XXI THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
XXII THE MEDICI GARDENS
XXIII MIRIAM AND HILDA
Volume II
XXIV THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
XXV SUNSHINE
XXVI THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
XXVII MYTHS
XXVIII THE OWL TOWER
XXIX ON THE BATTLEMENTS
XXX DONATELLO'S BUST
XXXI THE MARBLE SALOON
XXXII SCENES BY THE WAY
XXXIII PICTURED WINDOWS
XXXIV MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA
XXXV THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION
XXXVI HILDA'S TOWER
XXXVII THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
XXXVIII ALTARS AND INCENSE
XXXIX THE WORLD'S CATHEDRAL
XL HILDA AND A FRIEND
XLI SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
XLII REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
XLIII THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
XLIV THE DESERTED SHRINE
XLV THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES
XLVI A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
XLVII THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
XLVIII A SCENE IN THE CORSO
XLIX A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
L MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
THE MARBLE FAUN
Volume I
CHAPTER I
MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the
reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the
sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first,
after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble
and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his
death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian
Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still
shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,
although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps
corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here,
likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand
years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close
at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,
but assaulted by a snake.
From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone
steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the
Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right
below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum
(where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a
shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick
and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old
pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once
upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little way, considering how
much history is heaped into the intervening space--rises the great sweep
of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of
arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just
the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed
thitherward over his half finished wall.
We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those blue
distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable
with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in
the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling
which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous
remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a bygone life, of
which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or
crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real
here as elsewhere. Viewed through this medium, our narrative--into which
are woven some airy and unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others,
twisted out of the commonest stuff of human existence--may seem not widely
different from the texture of all our lives.
Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we
handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.
It might be that the four persons whom we are seeking to introduce were
conscious of this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the
square blocks of granite wherewith the Romans built their lives. Perhaps
it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was just now their
mood. When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it
seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gayly as we may,
and ask little reason wherefore.
Of these four friends of ours, three were artists, or connected with art;
and, at this moment, they had been simultaneously struck by a resemblance
between one of the antique statues, a well-known masterpiece of Grecian
sculpture, and a young Italian, the fourth member of their party.
"You must needs confess, Kenyon," said a dark-eyed young woman, whom her
friends called Miriam, "that you never chiselled out of marble, nor
wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as
you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment,
and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive
and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact,
and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement. Our friend
Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not true, Hilda?"
"Not quite--almost--yes, I really think so," replied Hilda, a slender,
brown-haired, New England girl, whose perceptions of form and expression
were wonderfully clear and delicate. "If there is any difference between
the two faces, the reason may be, I suppose, that the Faun dwelt in woods
and fields, and consorted with his like; whereas Donatello has known
cities a little, and such people as ourselves. But the resemblance is
very close, and very strange."
"Not so strange," whispered Miriam mischievously; "for no Faun in Arcadia
was ever a greater simpleton than Donatello. He has hardly a man's share
of wit, small as that may be. It is a pity there are no longer any of
this congenial race of rustic creatures for our friend to consort with!"
"Hush, naughty one!" returned Hilda. "You are very ungrateful, for you
well know he has wit enough to worship you, at all events."
"Then the greater fool he!" said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda's quiet
eyes were somewhat startled.
"Donatello, my dear friend," said Kenyon, in Italian, "pray gratify us all
by taking the exact attitude of this statue."
The young man laughed, and threw himself into the position in which the
statue has been standing for two or three thousand years. In truth,
allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion's skin could have
been substituted for his modern talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick,
Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously
softened into flesh and blood.
"Yes; the resemblance is wonderful," observed Kenyon, after examining the
marble and the man with the accuracy of a sculptor's eye. "There is one
point, however, or, rather, two points, in respect to which our friend
Donatello's abundant curls will not permit us to say whether the likeness
is carried into minute detail."
And the sculptor directed the attention of the party to the ears of the
beautiful statue which they were contemplating.
But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of art; it
must be described, however inadequate may be the effort to express its
magic peculiarity in words.
The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on the
trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side; in the
other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan instrument of
music. His only garment--a lion's skin, with the claws upon his
shoulder--falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front
of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is marvellously graceful,
but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh, and less of heroic
muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to assign to their types of
masculine beauty. The character of the face corresponds with the figure;
it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded and somewhat
voluptuously developed, especially about the throat and chin; the nose is
almost straight, but very slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an
indescribable charm of geniality and humor. The mouth, with its full yet
delicate lips, seems so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a
responsive smile. The whole statue--unlike anything else that ever was
wrought in that severe material of marble--conveys the idea of an amiable
and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable
of being touched by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone
image without conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its
substance were warm to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes
very close to some of our pleasantest sympathies.
Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic
ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an
object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart. The being
here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be
incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint
of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for
an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that
softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment, and
might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at need. It
is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of
his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature might
eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled.
The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun's
composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and
combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural
conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused
throughout his work that mute mystery,which so hopelessly perplexes us
whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of
the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by
two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf
shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of animals.
Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be considered as
clothed in fine, downy fur. In the coarser representations of this class
of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute kindred,--a
certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles must be
supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion's skin that forms his
garment. The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole indications
of his wild, forest nature.
Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the
sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill--in a word, a sculptor and
a poet too--could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then
have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble.
Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom both races
meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and
hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue,
he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of sylvan life,
all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that dwell in woods
and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one substance, along
with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees, grass, flowers,
woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man. The essence
of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists, within that
discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.
And, after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet's
reminiscence of a period when man's affinity with nature was more strict,
and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear.
CHAPTER II
THE FAUN
Donatello," playfully cried Miriam, "do not leave us in this perplexity!
Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears. If so, we
shall like you all the better!"
"No, no, dearest signorina," answered Donatello, laughing, but with a
certain earnestness. "I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
granted." As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the reach
of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter by
actual examination. "I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines," he
continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator, "if
you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it. It
has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me."
He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an unshaped
sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been chiefly
conversant with rural people.
"Well, well," said Miriam, "your tender point--your two tender points, if
you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned. But how strange
this likeness is, after all! and how delightful, if it really includes
the pointed ears! O, it is impossible, of course," she continued, in
English, "with a real and commonplace young man like Donatello; but you
see how this peculiarity defines the position of the Faun; and, while
putting him where he cannot exactly assert his brotherhood, still disposes
us kindly towards the kindred creature. He is not supernatural, but just
on the verge of nature, and yet within it. What is the nameless charm of
this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more delicately than I."
"It perplexes me," said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
"neither do I quite like to think about it."
"But, surely," said Kenyon, "you agree with Miriam and me that there is
something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun. In
some long-past age, he must really have existed. Nature needed, and still
needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
interpreting the whole existence of one to the other. What a pity that
he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,"
added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, "Donatello be actually he!"
"You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me," responded Miriam,
between jest and earnest. "Imagine, now, a real being, similar to this
mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be his life,
enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling in the
merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred do,--as
mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or morality
itself had ever been thought of! Ah! Kenyon, if Hilda and you and I--if
I, at least--had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had no conscience,
no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome recollections of any
sort; no dark future either."
"What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!" said the sculptor; and,
looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and tear-stained.
"How suddenly this mood has come over you!"
"Let it go as it came," said Miriam, "like a thunder-shower in this Roman
sky. All is sunshine again, you see!"
Donatello's refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
something, and he now came close to Miriam's side, gazing at her with an
appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness. His mute, helpless gesture
of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough excite
a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a hound when
he thinks himself in fault or disgrace. It was difficult to make out the
character of this young man. So full of animal life as he was, so joyous
in his deportment, so handsome, so physically well-developed, he made no
impression of incompleteness, of maimed or stinted nature. And yet, in
social intercourse, these familiar friends of his habitually and
instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or some other lawless thing,
exacting no strict obedience to conventional rules, and hardly noticing
his eccentricities enough to pardon them. There was an indefinable
characteristic about Donatello that set him outside of rules.
He caught Miriam's hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without saying
a word. She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
the way to receive it. Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger; it
might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of punishment.
At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite pleasure;
insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that fences in the
Dying Gladiator.
"It is the very step of the Dancing Faun," said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
"What a child, or what a simpleton, he is! I continually find myself
treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet he
can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he is at
least--how old should you think him, Hilda?"
"Twenty years, perhaps," replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; "but,
indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
older. He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth in
his face."
"All underwitted people have that look," said Miriam scornfully.
"Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,"
observed Kenyon, laughing; "for, judging by the date of this statue, which,
I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for him, he
must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks as young as
ever."
"What age have you, Donatello?" asked Miriam.
"Signorina, I do not know," he answered; "no great age, however; for I
have only lived since I met you."
"Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
smartly than that!" exclaimed Miriam. "Nature and art are just at one
sometimes. But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
Not to know his own age! It is equivalent to being immortal on earth. If
I could only forget mine!"
"It is too soon to wish that," observed the sculptor; "you are scarcely
older than Donatello looks."
"I shall be content, then," rejoined Miriam, "if I could only forget one
day of all my life." Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
hastily added, "A woman's days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
even one of them out of the account."
The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge. In this
frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
value to either. The resemblance between the marble Faun and their living
companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these
three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up,
as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy earthly feet from
the actual soil of life. The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a
moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all customary
responsibility for what they thought and said.
It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
abuse one another's works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the Dying
Gladiator.
"I used to admire this statue exceedingly," he remarked, "but, latterly, I
find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a length
of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death. If he is so terribly
hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado? Flitting
moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between two breaths,
ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble; in any
sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill, since there must
of necessity be a physical one. Otherwise, it is like flinging a block of
marble up into the air, and, by some trick of enchantment, causing it to
stick there. You feel that it ought to come down, and are dissatisfied
that it does not obey the natural law."
"I see," said Miriam mischievously, "you think that sculpture should be a
sort of fossilizing process. But, in truth, your frozen art has nothing
like the scope and freedom of Hilda's and mine. In painting there is no
similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of time,
--perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in picture, and
buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch. For instance,
a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of his far antiquity,
lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his simple heart warm."
"Ah, the Faun!" cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; "I have
been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful statue,
immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone. This change
is very apt to occur in statues."
"And a similar one in pictures, surely," retorted the sculptor. "It is
the spectator's mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself. I defy
any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and assistance."
"Then you are deficient of a sense," said Miriam.
The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
lies buried. And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might
lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo might
strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in red
marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth, leading
yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little hoofs upon
the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too, a rosy flush
diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could come down from his
pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to Donatello's lips;
because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf who so often shared his
revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the exquisitely carved figures
might assume life, and chase one another round its verge with that wild
merriment which is so strangely represented on those old burial coffers:
though still with some subtile allusion to death, carefully veiled, but
forever peeping forth amid emblems of mirth and riot.
As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.
"Do you know," said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, "I doubt the reality
of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
much about? To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
fancy, for the sake of a moment's mirth and wonder." "I was certainly in
earnest, and you seemed equally so," replied Hilda, glancing back at
Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance. "But faces
change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has often
no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at expression
more than outline. How sad and sombre he has grown all of a sudden!"
"Angry too, methinks! nay, it is anger much more than sadness," said
Miriam. "I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before. If you
consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of the bulldog, or some
other equally fierce brute, in our friend's composition; a trait of
savageness hardly to be expected in such a gentle creature as he usually
is. Donatello is a very strange young man. I wish he would not haunt my
footsteps so continually."
"You have bewitched the poor lad," said the sculptor, laughing. "You have
a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a singular
train of followers. I see another of them behind yonder pillar; and it is
his presence that has aroused Donatello's wrath."
They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly concealed
by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as may often be
encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere else. He
looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and, in truth,
was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being no other
than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild of aspect and
attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins, according as their
pictorial purposes demand.
"Miriam," whispered Hilda, a little startled, "it is your model!"
CHAPTER III
SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
Miriam's model has so important a connection with our story, that it is
essential to describe the singular mode of his first appearance, and how
he subsequently became a self-appointed follower of the young female
artist. In the first place, however, we must devote a page or two to
certain peculiarities in the position of Miriam herself.
There was an ambiguity about this young lady, which, though it did not
necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavorably as
regarded her reception in society, anywhere but in Rome. The truth was,
that nobody knew anything about Miriam, either for good or evil. She had
made her appearance without introduction, had taken a studio, put her card
upon the door, and showed very considerable talent as a painter in oils.
Her fellow professors of the brush, it is true, showered abundant
criticisms upon her pictures, allowing them to be well enough for the idle
half-efforts of an amateur, but lacking both the trained skill and the
practice that distinguish the works of a true artist.
Nevertheless, be their faults what they might, Miriam's pictures met with
good acceptance among the patrons of modern art. Whatever technical merit
they lacked, its absence was more than supplied by a warmth and
passionateness, which she had the faculty of putting into her productions,
and which all the world could feel. Her nature had a great deal of color,
and, in accordance with it, so likewise had her pictures.
Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse; her manners were so far
from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with her,
and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy. Such,
at least, was the impression which she made, upon brief contact, but not
such the ultimate conclusion of those who really sought to know her. So
airy, free, and affable was Miriam's deportment towards all who came
within her sphere, that possibly they might never be conscious of the fact,
but so it was, that they did not get on, and were seldom any further
advanced into her good graces to-day than yesterday. By some subtile
quality, she kept people at a distance, without so much as letting them
know that they were excluded from her inner circle. She resembled one of
those images of light, which conjurers evoke and cause to shine before us,
in apparent tangibility, only an arm's length beyond our grasp: we make a
step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion, but find it still
precisely so far out of our reach. Finally, society began to recognize
the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and gruffly acquiesced.
There were two persons, however, whom she appeared to acknowledge as
friends in the closer and truer sense of the word; and both of these more
favored individuals did credit to Miriam's selection. One was a young
American sculptor, of high promise and rapidly increasing celebrity; the
other, a girl of the same country, a painter like Miriam herself, but in a
widely different sphere of art. Her heart flowed out towards these two;
she requited herself by their society and friendship (and especially by
Hilda's) for all the loneliness with which, as regarded the rest of the
world, she chose to be surrounded. Her two friends were conscious of the
strong, yearning grasp which Miriam laid upon them, and gave her their
affection in full measure; Hilda, indeed, responding with the fervency of
a girl's first friendship, and Kenyon with a manly regard, in which there
was nothing akin to what is distinctively called love.
A sort of intimacy subsequently grew up between these three friends and a
fourth individual; it was a young Italian, who, casually visiting Rome,
had been attracted by the beauty which Miriam possessed in a remarkable
degree. He had sought her, followed her, and insisted, with simple
perseverance, upon being admitted at least to her acquaintance; a boon
which had been granted, when a more artful character, seeking it by a more
subtle mode of pursuit, would probably have failed to obtain it. This
young man, though anything but intellectually brilliant, had many
agreeable characteristics which won him the kindly and halfcontemptuous
regard of Miriam and her two friends. It was he whom they called
Donatello, and whose wonderful resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles forms
the keynote of our narrative.
Such was the position in which we find Miriam some few months after her
establishment at Rome. It must be added, however, that the world did not
permit her to hide her antecedents without making her the subject of a
good deal of conjecture; as was natural enough, considering the abundance
of her personal charms, and the degree of notice that she attracted as an
artist. There were many stories about Miriam's origin and previous life,
some of which had a very probable air, while others were evidently wild
and romantic fables. We cite a few, leaving the reader to designate them
either under the probable or the romantic head.
It was said, for example, that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of a
great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich Oriental
character in her face), and had fled from her paternal home to escape a
union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden brotherhood; the
object being to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family.
Another story hinted that she was a German princess, whom, for reasons
of state, it was proposed to give in marriage either to a decrepit
sovereign, or a prince still in his cradle. According to a third
statement, she was the off-spring of a Southern American planter, who had
given her an elaborate education and endowed her with his wealth; but the
one burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with a
sense of ignominy, that she relinquished all and fled her country. By
still another account she was the lady of an English nobleman; and, out of
mere love and honor of art, had thrown aside the splendor of her rank, and
come to seek a subsistence by her pencil in a Roman studio.
In all the above cases, the fable seemed to be instigated by the large and
bounteous impression which Miriam invariably made, as if necessity and she
could have nothing to do with one another. Whatever deprivations she
underwent must needs be voluntary. But there were other surmises, taking
such a commonplace view as that Miriam was the daughter of a merchant or
financier, who had been ruined in a great commercial crisis; and,
possessing a taste for art, she had attempted to support herself by the
pencil, in preference to the alternative of going out as governess.
Be these things how they might, Miriam, fair as she looked, was plucked up
out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her. She was a
beautiful and attractive woman, but based, as it were, upon a cloud, and
all surrounded with misty substance; so that the result was to render her
sprite-like in her most ordinary manifestations. This was the case even
in respect to Kenyon and Hilda, her especial friends. But such was the
effect of Miriam's natural language, her generosity, kindliness, and
native truth of character, that these two received her as a dear friend
into their hearts, taking her good qualities as evident and genuine, and
never imagining that what was hidden must be therefore evil.
We now proceed with our narrative.
The same party of friends, whom we have seen at the sculpture-gallery of
the Capitol, chanced to have gone together, some months before, to the
catacomb of St. Calixtus. They went joyously down into that vast tomb,
and wandered by torchlight through a sort of dream, in which reminiscences
of church aisles and grimy cellars--and chiefly the latter--seemed to be
broken into fragments, and hopelessly intermingled. The intricate
passages along which they followed their guide had been hewn, in some
forgotten age, out of a dark-red, crumbly stone. On either side were
horizontal niches, where, if they held their torches closely, the shape of
a human body was discernible in white ashes, into which the entire
mortality of a man or woman had resolved itself. Among all this extinct
dust, there might perchance be a thigh-bone, which crumbled at a touch; or
possibly a skull, grinning at its own wretched plight, as is the ugly and
empty habit of the thing.
Sometimes their gloomy pathway tended upward, so that, through a crevice,
a little daylight glimmered down upon them, or even a streak of sunshine
peeped into a burial niche; then again, they went downward by gradual
descent, or by abrupt, rudely hewn steps, into deeper and deeper recesses
of the earth. Here and there the narrow and tortuous passages widened
somewhat, developing themselves into small chapels;--which once, no doubt,
had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with ever-burning lamps and
tapers. All such illumination and ornament, however, had long since been
extinguished and stript away; except, indeed, that the low roofs of a few
of these ancient sites of worship were covered with dingy stucco, and
frescoed with scriptural scenes and subjects, in the dreariest stage of
ruin.
In one such chapel, the guide showed them a low arch, beneath which the
body of St. Cecilia had been buried after her martyrdom, and where it lay
till a sculptor saw it, and rendered it forever beautiful in marble.
In a similar spot they found two sarcophagi, one containing a skeleton,
and the other a shrivelled body, which still wore the garments of its
former lifetime.
"How dismal all this is!" said Hilda, shuddering. "I do not know why we
came here, nor why we should stay a moment longer."
"I hate it all!" cried Donatello with peculiar energy. "Dear friends,
let us hasten back into the blessed daylight!"
From the first, Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition; for,
like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his own
simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite
repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the
Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death. He shuddered, and
looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive
influence alone had enticed him into that gloomy region.
"What a child you are, poor Donatello!" she observed, with the freedom
which she always used towards him. "You are afraid of ghosts!"
"Yes, signorina; terribly afraid!" said the truthful Donatello.
"I also believe in ghosts," answered Miriam, "and could tremble at them,
in a suitable place. But these sepulchres are so old, and these skulls
and white ashes so very dry, that methinks they have ceased to be haunted.
The most awful idea connected with the catacombs is their interminable
extent, and the possibility of going astray into this labyrinth of
darkness, which broods around the little glimmer of our tapers."
"Has any one ever been lost here?" asked Kenyon of the guide.
"Surely, signor; one, no longer ago than my father's time," said the guide;
and he added, with the air of a man who believed what he was telling,
"but the first that went astray here was a pagan of old Rome, who hid
himself in order to spy out and betray the blessed saints, who then dwelt
and worshipped in these dismal places. You have heard the story, signor?
A miracle was wrought upon the accursed one; and, ever since (for fifteen
centuries at least), he has been groping in the darkness, seeking his way
out of the catacomb."
"Has he ever been seen?" asked Hilda, who had great and tremulous faith
in marvels of this kind.
"These eyes of mine never beheld him, signorina; the saints forbid!"
answered the guide. "But it is well known that he watches near parties
that come into the catacomb, especially if they be heretics, hoping to
lead some straggler astray. What this lost wretch pines for, almost as
much as for the blessed sunshine, is a companion to be miserable with him."
"Such an intense desire for sympathy indicates something amiable in the
poor fellow, at all events," observed Kenyon.
They had now reached a larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it was of
a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red sandstone,
had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular
architectural design. Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was
exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man's stature in height, and
only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected
torches illuminated this one small, consecrated spot, the great darkness
spread all round it, like that immenser mystery which envelops our little
life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one. "Why, where is
Miriam?" cried Hilda. The party gazed hurriedly from face to face, and
became aware that one of their party had vanished into the great darkness,
even while they were shuddering at the remote possibility of such a
misfortune.
CHAPTER IV
THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
Surely, she cannot be lost!" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is but a moment since
she was speaking."
"No, no!" said Hilda, in great alarm. "She was behind us all; and it is
a long while since we have heard her voice!"
"Torches! torches!" cried Donatello desperately. "I will seek her, be
the darkness ever so dismal!"
But the guide held him back, and assured them all that there was no
possibility of assisting their lost companion, unless by shouting at the
very top of their voices. As the sound would go very far along these
close and narrow passages, there was a fair probability that Miriam might
hear the call, and be able to retrace her steps.
Accordingly, they all--Kenyon with his bass voice; Donatello with his
tenor; the guide with that high and hard Italian cry, which makes the
streets of Rome so resonant; and Hilda with her slender scream, piercing
farther than the united uproar of the rest--began to shriek, halloo, and
bellow, with the utmost force of their lungs. And, not to prolong the
reader's suspense (for we do not particularly seek to interest him in this
scene, telling it only on account of the trouble and strange entanglement
which followed), they soon heard a responsive call, in a female voice.
"It was the signorina!" cried Donatello joyfully.
"Yes; it was certainly dear Miriam's voice," said Hilda. "And here she
comes! Thank Heaven! Thank Heaven!"
The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight,
approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward,
but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just
rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate
response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they
afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and
self-concentrated in her deportment. She looked pale, as well she might,
and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen in
the irregular twinkling of the flame. This last was the chief perceptible
sign of any recent agitation or alarm.
"Dearest, dearest Miriam," exclaimed Hilda, throwing her arms about her
friend, "where have you been straying from us? Blessed be Providence,
which has rescued you out of that miserable darkness!"
"Hush, dear Hilda!" whispered Miriam, with a strange little laugh. "Are
you quite sure that it was Heaven's guidance which brought me back? If so,
it was by an odd messenger, as you will confess. See; there he stands."
Startled at Miriam's words and manner, Hilda gazed into the duskiness
whither she pointed, and there beheld a figure standing just on the
doubtful limit of obscurity, at the threshold of the small, illuminated
chapel. Kenyon discerned him at the same instant, and drew nearer with
his torch; although the guide attempted to dissuade him, averring that,
once beyond the consecrated precincts of the chapel, the apparition would
have power to tear him limb from limb. It struck the sculptor, however,
when he afterwards recurred to these circumstances, that the guide
manifested no such apprehension on his own account as he professed on
behalf of others; for he kept pace with Kenyon as the latter approached
the figure, though still endeavoring to restrain 'him.
In fine, they both drew near enough to get as good a view of the spectre
as the smoky light of their torches, struggling with the massive gloom,
could supply.
The stranger was of exceedingly picturesque, and even melodramatic aspect.
He was clad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a buffalo's
hide, and a pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair outward, which
are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman Campagna. In this
garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth, the Spectre of the
Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race,
hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life of
woods and streams.
Furthermore, he had on a broad-brimmed, conical hat, beneath the shadow of
which a wild visage was indistinctly seen, floating away, as it were, into
a dusky wilderness of mustache and beard. His eyes winked, and turned
uneasily from the torches, like a creature to whom midnight would be more
congenial than noonday.
On the whole, the spectre might have made a considerable impression on the
sculptor's nerves, only that he was in the habit of observing similar
figures, almost every day, reclining on the Spanish steps, and waiting for
some artist to invite them within the magic realm of picture. Nor, even
thus familiarized with the stranger's peculiarities of appearance, could
Kenyon help wondering to see such a personage, shaping himself so suddenly
out of the void darkness of the catacomb.
"What are you?" said the sculptor, advancing his torch nearer. "And how
long have you been wandering here?"
"A thousand and five hundred years!" muttered the guide, loud enough to
be heard by all the party. "It is the old pagan phantom that I told you
of, who sought to betray the blessed saints!"
"Yes; it is a phantom!" cried Donatello, with a shudder. "Ah, dearest
signorina, what a fearful thing has beset you in those dark corridors!"
"Nonsense, Donatello," said the sculptor. "The man is no more a phantom
than yourself. The only marvel is, how he comes to be hiding himself in
the catacomb. Possibly our guide might solve the riddle."
The spectre himself here settled the point of his tangibility, at all
events, and physical substance, by approaching a step nearer, and laying
his hand on Kenyon's arm.
"Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness," said he,
in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great deal of damp were clustering in
his throat. "Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.
She came to me when I sought her not. She has called me forth, and must
abide the consequences of my reappearance in the world."
"Holy Virgin! I wish the signorina joy of her prize," said the guide,
half to himself. "And in any case, the catacomb is well rid of him."
We need follow the scene no further. So much is essential to the
subsequent narrative, that, during the short period while astray in those
tortuous passages, Miriam had encountered an unknown man, and led him
forth with her, or was guided back by him, first into the torchlight,
thence into the sunshine.
It was the further singularity of this affair, that the connection, thus
briefly and casually formed, did not terminate with the incident that gave
it birth. As if her service to him, or his service to her, whichever it
might be, had given him an indefeasible claim on Miriam's regard and
protection, the Spectre of the Catacomb never long allowed her to lose
sight of him, from that day forward. He haunted her footsteps with more
than the customary persistency of Italian mendicants, when once they have
recognized a benefactor. For days together, it is true, he occasionally
vanished, but always reappeared, gliding after her through the narrow
streets, or climbing the hundred steps of her staircase and sitting at her
threshold.
Being often admitted to her studio, he left his features, or some shadow
or reminiscence of them, in many of her sketches and pictures. The moral
atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival
painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy
all Miriam's prospects of true excellence in art.
The story of this adventure spread abroad, and made its way beyond the
usual gossip of the Forestieri, even into Italian circles, where, enhanced
by a still potent spirit of superstition, it grew far more wonderful than
as above recounted. Thence, it came back among the Anglo-Saxons, and was
communicated to the German artists, who so richly supplied it with
romantic ornaments and excrescences, after their fashion, that it became a
fantasy worthy of Tieck or Hoffmann. For nobody has any conscience about
adding to the improbabilities of a marvellous tale.
The most reasonable version of the incident, that could anywise be
rendered acceptable to the auditors, was substantially the one suggested
by the guide of the catacomb, in his allusion to the legend of Memmius.
This man, or demon, or man-demon, was a spy during the persecutions of the
early Christians, probably under the Emperor Diocletian, and penetrated
into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, with the malignant purpose of tracing
out the hiding-places of the refugees. But, while he stole craftily
through those dark corridors, he chanced to come upon a little chapel,
where tapers were burning before an altar and a crucifix, and a priest was
in the performance of his sacred office. By divine indulgence, there was
a single moment's grace allowed to Memmius, during which, had he been
capable of Christian faith and love, he might have knelt before the cross,
and received the holy light into his soul, and so have been blest forever.
But he resisted the sacred impulse. As soon, therefore, as that one
moment had glided by, the light of the consecrated tapers, which represent
all truth, bewildered the wretched man with everlasting error, and the
blessed cross itself was stamped as a seal upon his heart, so that it
should never open to receive conviction.
Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary
precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims
into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to
prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out
into the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,
the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would
gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his
benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten
and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern world
some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans knew,--and
then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long haunting it,
has grown his most congenial home.
Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle Hilda,
often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in reference
to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were, on all ordinary
subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the mystery, since
undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently perplexing in itself,
without any help from the imaginative faculty. And, sometimes responding
to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of playfulness, Miriam let her
fancy run off into wilder fables than any which German ingenuity or
Italian superstition had contrived.
For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only
belied by a laughlng gleam in her. dark eyes, she would aver that the
spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime)had promised to
teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco painting.
The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head of modern
art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should return with him
into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain extent of stuccoed
wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And what true votary of
art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even at so vast a sacrifice!
Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied, that,
meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the catacomb,
she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve the glory and
satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith. For the sake of
so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation against his,
binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom, if, within a
twelvemonth's space, she should not have convinced him of the errors
through which he had so long groped and stumbled. But, alas! up to the
present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of the man-demon;
and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda's ear) had awful forebodings, that,
in a few more months, she must take an eternal farewell of the sun!
It was somewhat remarkable that all her romantic fantasies arrived at this
self-same dreary termination,--it appeared impossible for her even to
imagine any other than a disastrous result from her connection with her
ill-omened attendant.
This singularity might have meant nothing, however, had it not suggested a
despondent state of mind, which was likewise indicated by many other
tokens. Miriam's friends had no difficulty in perceiving that, in one way
or another, her happiness was very seriously compromised. Her spirits
were often depressed into deep melancholy. If ever she was gay, it was
seldom with a healthy cheerfulness. She grew moody, moreover, and subject
to fits of passionate ill temper; which usually wreaked itself on the
heads of those who loved her best. Not that Miriam's indifferent
acquaintances were safe from similar outbreaks of her displeasure,
especially if they ventured upon any allusion to the model. In such cases,
they were left with little disposition to renew the subject, but inclined,
on the other hand, to interpret the whole matter as much to her discredit
as the least favorable coloring of the facts would allow.
It may occur to the reader, that there was really no demand for so much
rumor and speculation in regard to an incident, Which might well enough
have been explained without going many steps beyond the limits of
probability. The spectre might have been merely a Roman beggar, whose
fraternity often harbor in stranger shelters than the catacombs; or one of
those pilgrims, who still journey from remote countries to kneel and
worship at the holy sites, among which these haunts of the early
Christians are esteemed especially sacred. Or, as was perhaps a more
plausible theory, he might be a thief of the city, a robber of the
Campagna, a political offender, or an assassin, with blood upon his hand;
whom the negligence or connivance of the police allowed to take refuge in
those subterranean fastnesses, where such outlaws have been accustomed to
hide themselves from a far antiquity downward. Or he might have been a
lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his dark pleasure
to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes afar to us from
Scripture times.
And, as for the stranger's attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to those
who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds of idle
Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow charity, or be
otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest interest in their
fortunes.
Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance, and
moody passion. If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome. Such, at least, was the view of the
case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds, and
impart to those whom their opinions might influence.
One of Miriam's friends took the matter sadly to heart. This was the
young Italian. Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of the
stranger's first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition. It
resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
insight into character. The shadow of the model, always flung into the
light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
Donatello. Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted from
his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.
CHAPTER V
MIRIAM'S STUDIO
The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago are
a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more than
many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass through
the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a
range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in
the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique
statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost
what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant
atmosphere--the nose. Bas-reliefs, the spoil of some far older palace,
are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of which has been ravished
from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin which earlier barbarism had
not already levelled with the earth. Between two of the pillars, moreover,
stands an old sarcophagus without its lid, and with all its more
prominently projecting sculptures broken off; perhaps it once held famous
dust, and the bony framework of some historic man, although now only a
receptacle for the rubbish of the courtyard, and a half-worn broom.
In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the
hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,
appears a fountain. It brims over from one stone basin to another, or
gushes from a Naiad's urn, or spurts its many little jets from the mouths
of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial when
Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced them; but
now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing maiden-hair, and
all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks and crevices of moist
marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain back into her great heart,
and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a woodland spring. And hark, the
pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash! You might hear just those
tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the forest, though here they
gain a delicious pathos from the stately echoes that reverberate their
natural language. So the fountain is not altogether glad, after all its
three centuries at play!
In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access to
the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up which, in
former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great Roman
family who built this palace. Or they have come down, with still grander
and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal, there to
put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown. But, in fine,
all these illustrious personages have gone down their hereditary
staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the thoroughfare of
ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires, artists, tradesmen,
washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of whom find such gilded and
marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and luxury demand, or such homely
garrets as their necessity can pay for, within this one multifarious abode.
Only, in not a single nook of the palace (built for splendor, and the
accommodation of a vast retinue, but with no vision of a happy fireside or
any mode of domestic enjoyment) does the humblest or the haughtiest
occupant find comfort.
Up such a staircase, on the morning after the scene at the sculpture
gallery, sprang the light foot of Donatello. He ascended from story to
story, passing lofty doorways, set within rich frames of sculptured marble,
and climbing unweariedly upward, until the glories of the first piano and
the elegance of the middle height were exchanged for a sort of Alpine
region, cold and naked in its aspect. Steps of rough stone, rude wooden
balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash on the
walls; these were here the palatial features. Finally, he paused before
an oaken door, on which was pinned a card, bearing the name of Miriam
Schaefer, artist in oils. Here Donatello knocked, and the door
immediately fell somewhat ajar; its latch having been pulled up by means
of a string on the inside. Passing through a little anteroom, he found
himself in Miriam's presence.
"Come in, wild Faun," she said, "and tell me the latest news from Arcady!"
The artist was not just then at her easel, but was busied with the
feminine task of mending a pair of gloves.
There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching,--at least, of
very sweet, soft, and winning effect,--in this peculiarity of needlework,
distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of any such
by-play aside from the main business of life; but women--be they of what
earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or genius, or endowed
with awful beauty--have always some little handiwork ready to fill the
tiny gap of every vacant moment. A needle is familiar to the fingers of
them all. A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the woman poet can use
it as adroitly as her pen; the woman's eye, that has discovered a new star,
turns from its glory to send the polished little instrument gleaming
along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual fray in her dress. And
they have greatly the advantage of us in this respect. The slender thread
of silk or cotton keeps them united with the small, familiar, gentle
interests of life, the continually operating influences of which do so
much for the health of the character, and carry off what would otherwise
be a dangerous accumulation of morbid sensibility. A vast deal of human
sympathy runs along this electric line, stretching from the throne to the
wicker chair of the humblest seamstress, and keeping high and low in a
species of communion with their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of
healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and
accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home
with their own hearts than while so occupied.
And when the work falls in a woman's lap, of its own accord, and the
needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble, quite as
trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself. This was what happened to
Miriam. Even while Donatello stood gazing at her, she seemed to have
forgotten his presence, allowing him to drop out of her thoughts, and the
torn glove to fall from her idle fingers. Simple as he was, the young man
knew by his sympathies that something was amiss.
"Dear lady, you are sad," said he, drawing close to her.
"It is nothing, Donatello," she replied, resuming her work; "yes; a little
sad, perhaps; but that is not strange for us people of the ordinary world,
especially for women. You are of a cheerfuller race, my friend, and know
nothing of this disease of sadness. But why do you come into this shadowy
room of mine?"
"Why do you make it so shadowy?" asked he.
"We artists purposely exclude sunshine, and all but a partial light," said
Miriam, "because we think it necessary to put ourselves at odds with
Nature before trying to imitate her. That strikes you very strangely,
does it not? But we make very pretty pictures sometimes with our artfully
arranged lights and shadows. Amuse yourself with some of mine, Donatello,
and by and by I shall be in the mood to begin the portrait we were talking
about."
The room had the customary aspect of a painter's studio; one of those
delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual world, but
rather to be the outward type of a poet's haunted imagination, where there
are glimpses, sketches, and half-developed hints of beings and objects
grander and more beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality. The
windows were closed with shutters, or deeply curtained, except one, which
was partly open to a sunless portion of the sky, admitting only from high
upward that partial light which, with its strongly marked contrast of
shadow, is the first requisite towards seeing objects pictorially.
Pencil-drawings were pinned against the wall or scattered on the tables.
Unframed canvases turned their backs on the spectator, presenting only a
blank to the eye, and churlishly concealing whatever riches of scenery or
human beauty Miriam's skill had depicted on the other side.
In the obscurest part of the room Donatello was half startled at
perceiving duskily a woman with long dark hair, who threw up her arms with
a wild gesture of tragic despair, and appeared to beckon him into the
darkness along with her.
"Do not be afraid, Donatello," said Miriam, smiling to see him peering
doubtfully into the mysterious dusk. "She means you no mischief, nor
could perpetrate any if she wished it ever so much. It is a lady of
exceedingly pliable disposition; now a heroine of romance, and now a
rustic maid; yet all for show; being created, indeed, on purpose to wear
rich shawls and other garments in a becoming fashion. This is the true
end of her being, although she pretends to assume the most varied duties
and perform many parts in life, while really the poor puppet has nothing
on earth to do. Upon my word, I am satirical unawares, and seem to be
describing nine women out of ten in the person of my lay-figure. For most
purposes she has the advantage of the sisterhood. Would I were like her!"
"How it changes her aspect," exclaimed Donatello, "to know that she is but
a jointed figure! When my eyes first fell upon her, I thought her arms
moved, as if beckoning me to help her in some direful peril."
"Are you often troubled with such sinister freaks of fancy?" asked Miriam.
"I should not have supposed it."
"To tell you the truth, dearest signorina," answered the young Italian, "I
am apt to be fearful in old, gloomy houses, and in the dark. I love no
dark or dusky corners, except it be in a grotto, or among the thick green
leaves of an arbor, or in some nook of the woods, such as I know many in
the neighborhood of my home. Even there, if a stray sunbeam steal in, the
shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer."
"Yes; you are a Faun, you know," said the fair artist, laughing at the
remembrance of the scene of the day before. "But the world is sadly
changed nowadays; grievously changed, poor Donatello, since those happy
times when your race used to dwell in the Arcadian woods, playing hide and
seek with the nymphs in grottoes and nooks of shrubbery. You have
reappeared on earth some centuries too late."
"I do not understand you now," answered Donatello, looking perplexed;
"only, signorina, I am glad to have my lifetime while you live; and where
you are, be it in cities or fields, I would fain be there too."
"I wonder whether I ought to allow you to speak in this way," said Miriam,
looking thoughtfully at him. "Many young women would think it behooved
them to be offended. Hilda would never let you speak so, I dare say.
But he is a mere boy," she added, aside, "a simple boy, putting his boyish
heart to the proof on the first woman whom he chances to meet. If yonder
lay-figure had had the luck to meet him first, she would have smitten him
as deeply as I."
"Are you angry with me?" asked Donatello dolorously.
"Not in the least," answered Miriam, frankly giving him her hand. "Pray
look over some of these sketches till I have leisure to chat with you a
little. I hardly think I am in spirits enough to begin your portrait
to-day."
Donatello was as gentle and docile as a pet spaniel; as playful, too, in
his general disposition, or saddening with his mistress's variable mood
like that or any other kindly animal which has the faculty of bestowing
its sympathies more completely than men or women can ever do.
Accordingly, as Miriam bade him, he tried to turn his attention to a great
pile and confusion of pen and ink sketches and pencil drawings which lay
tossed together on a table. As it chanced, however, they gave the poor
youth little delight.
The first that he took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the
artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the
nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable
power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and deathlike,
as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first stroke of her
murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly
impelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.
Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of
perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty beauty;
but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story itself,
Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at once
converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. It was evident that a Jael
like this would be sure to search Sisera's pockets as soon as the breath
was out of his body.
In another sketch she had attempted the story of Judith, which we see
represented by the old masters so often, and in such various styles.
Here, too, beginning with a passionate and fiery conception of the subject
in all earnestness, she had given the last touches in utter scorn, as it
were, of the feelings which at first took such powerful possession of her
hand. The head of Holofernes (which, by the bye, had a pair of twisted
mustaches, like those of a certain potentate of the day) being fairly cut
off, was screwing its eyes upward and twirling its features into a
diabolical grin of triumphant malice, which it flung right in Judith's
face. On her part, she had the startled aspect that might be conceived of
a cook if a calf's head should sneer at her when about to be popped into
the dinner-pot.
Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a
revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to see how
the artist's imagination seemed to run on these stories of bloodshed, in
which woman's hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how, too,--in one form
or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not to bring out the
moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life,
whatever were the motive that impelled her.
One of the sketches represented the daughter of Herodias receiving the
head of John the Baptist in a charger. The general conception appeared to
be taken from Bernardo Luini's picture, in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence;
but Miriam had imparted to the saint's face a look of gentle and heavenly
reproach, with sad and blessed eyes fixed upward at the maiden; by the
force of which miraculous glance, her whole womanhood was at once awakened
to love and endless remorse.
These sketches had a most disagreeable effect on Donatello's peculiar
temperament. He gave a shudder; his face assumed a look of trouble, fear,
and disgust; he snatched up one sketch after another, as if about to tear
it in pieces. Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he shrank back
from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.
"What is the matter, Donatello?" asked Miriam, looking up from a letter
which she was now writing. "Ah! I did not mean you to see those drawings.
They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things that I
created, but things that haunt me. See! here are some trifles that
perhaps will please you better."
She gave him a portfolio, the sketches in which indicated a happier mood
of mind, and one, it is to be hoped, more truly characteristic of the
artist. Supposing neither of these classes of subject to show anything of
her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy, and a
singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her productions.
The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so finely and
subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see at any moment, and
eye,where; while still there was the indefinable something added, or taken
away, which makes all the difference between sordid life and an earthly
paradise. The feeling and sympathy in. all of them were deep and true.
There was the scene, that comes once in every life, of the lover winning
the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection from the maiden whose
slender form half leans towards his arm, half shrinks from it, we know not
which. There was wedded affection in its successive stages, represented
in a series of delicately conceived designs, touched with a holy fire,
that burned from youth to age in those two hearts, and gave one identical
beauty to the faces throughout all the changes of feature.
There was a drawing of an infant's shoe, half worn out, with the airy
print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
until Miriam revealed it to her. It was wonderful, the depth and force
with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
profound significance which they often acquired. The artist, still in her
fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and rich
experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch of all,
the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and not a
prophecy. But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to last,
they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with the
warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart, and thus idealizing a truer
and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than an actual
acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have inspired.
So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety of
imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly with
the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might individually
be.
There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist
relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness which she could so
profoundly appreciate for others. In all those sketches of common life,
and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was portrayed apart, now
it peeped between the branches of a shrubbery, amid which two lovers sat;
now it was looking through a frosted window, from the outside, while a
young wedded pair sat at their new fireside within; and once it leaned
from a chariot, which six horses were whirling onward in pomp and pride,
and gazed at a scene of humble enjoyment by a cottage door. Always it was
the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of deep sadness;
and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out, the face and
form had the traits of Miriam's own.
"Do you like these sketches better, Donatello?" asked Miriam. "Yes,"
said Donatello rather doubtfully. "Not much, I fear," responded she,
laughing. "And what should a boy like you--a Faun too,--know about the
joys and sorrows, the intertwining light and shadow, of human life? I
forgot that you were a Faun. You cannot suffer deeply; therefore you can
but half enjoy. Here, now, is a subject which you can better appreciate."
The sketch represented merely a rustic dance, but with such extravagance
of fun as was delightful to behold; and here there was no drawback, except
that strange sigh and sadness which always come when we are merriest.
"I am going to paint the picture in oils," said the artist; "and I want
you, Donatello, for the wildest dancer of them all. Will you sit for me,
some day?--or, rather, dance for me?"
"O, most gladly, signorina!" exclaimed Donatello. "See; it shall be like
this."
And forthwith he began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an
incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one toe,
as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky nature
could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy chamber,
whence the artist had so carefully excluded the sunshine, was as
enlivening as if one bright ray had contrived to shimmer in and. frolic
around the walls, and finally rest just in the centre of the floor.
"That was admirable!" said Miriam, with an approving smile. "If I can
catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid
you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just
when I shall have given it the last touch. We will try it one of these
days. And now, to reward you for that jolly exhibition, you shall see
what has been shown to no one else."
She went to her easel, on which was placed a picture with its back turned
towards the spectator. Reversing the position, there appeared the
portrait of a beautiful woman, such as one sees only two or three, if even
so many times, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to get
into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be shut out,
but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain; holding your inner
realm as a conquered territory, though without deigning to make herself at
home there.
She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish
aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was
it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your glance
would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not sounded,
though it lay open to the day. She had black, abundant hair, with none
of the vulgar glossiness of other women's sable locks; if she were really
of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory such as
crowns no Christian maiden's head. Gazing at this portrait, you saw what
Rachel might have been, when Jacob deemed her worth the wooing seven years,
and seven more; or perchance she might ripen to be what Judith was, when
she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much
adoring it.
Miriam watched Donatello's contemplation of the picture, and seeing his
simple rapture, a smile of pleasure brightened on her face, mixed with a
little scorn; at least, her lips curled, and her eyes gleamed, as if she
disdained either his admiration or her own enjoyment of it.
"Then you like the picture, Donatello?" she asked.
"O, beyond what I can tell!" he answered. "So beautiful!--so beautiful!"
"And do you recognize the likeness?"
"Signorina," exclaimed Donatello, turning from the picture to the artist,
in astonishment that she should ask/:he question, "the resemblance is as
little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the smooth surface of a
fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth the image that you
made there! It is yourself!"
Donatello said the truth; and we forebore to speak descriptively of
Miriam's beauty earlier in our narrative, because we foresaw this occasion
to bring it perhaps more forcibly before the reader.
We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness; probably not,
regarding it merely as the delineation of a lovely face; although Miriam,
like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain graces which
Other eyes might not discern. Artists are fond of painting their own
portraits; and, in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds of them,
including the most illustrious, in all of which there are autobiographical
characteristics, so to speak,--traits, expressions, loftinesses, and
amenities, which would have been invisible, had they not been painted from
within. Yet their reality and truth are none the less. Miriam, in like
manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the intimate results of her heart
knowledge into her own.portrait, and perhaps wished to try whether they
would be perceptible to so simple and natural an observer as Donatello.
"Does the expression please you?" she asked.
"Yes," said Donatello hesitatingly; "if it would only smile so like the
sunshine as you sometimes do. No, it is sadder than I thought at first.
Cannot you make yourself smile a little, signorina?"
"A forced smile is uglier than a frown," said Miriam, a bright, natural
smile breaking out over her face even as she spoke.
"O, catch it now!" cried Donatello, clapping his hands. "Let it shine
upon the picture! There! it has vanished already! And you are sad again,
very sad; and the picture gazes sadly forth at me, as if some evil had
befallen it in the little time since I looked last."
"How perplexed you seem, my friend!" answered Miriam. "I really half
believe you are a Faun, there is such a mystery and terror for you in
these dark moods, which are just as natural as daylight to us people of
ordinary mould. I advise you, at all events, to look at other faces with
those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze at mine!"
"You speak in vain," replied the young man, with a deeper emphasis than
she had ever before heard in his voice; "shroud yourself in what gloom you
will, I must needs follow you."
"Well, well, well," said Miriam impatiently; "but leave me now; for to
speak plainly, my good friend, you grow a little wearisome. I walk this
afternoon in the Borghese grounds. Meet me there, if it suits your
pleasure."
CHAPTER VI
THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE
After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and taking
her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what might be
called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza. The neighborhood
comprised a baker's oven, emitting the usual fragrance of sour bread; a
shoe shop; a linen-draper's shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a lottery office;
a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in front; and a
fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the dried kernels of
chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of yesterday. A church,
of course, was near at hand, the facade of which ascended into lofty
pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged figures of stone,
either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets in close vicinity to
the upper windows of an old and shabby palace. This palace was
distinguished by a feature not very common in the architecture of Roman
edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower, square, massive, lofty, and
battlemented and machicolated at the summit.
At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin, such
as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or never,
except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary level of
men's views and aspirations. Connected with this old tower and its lofty
shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell; but for
centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image, at noon, at
midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept burning
forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower itself, the
palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from its hereditary
possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become the property of
the Church.
As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the flame
of the neverdying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad sunlight that
brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves, skimming, fluttering,
and wheeling about the topmost height of the tower, their silver wings
flashing in the pure transparency of the air. Several of them sat on the
ledge of the upper window, pushing one another off by their eager struggle
for this favorite station, and all tapping their beaks and flapping their
wings tumultuously against the panes; some had alighted in the street, far
below, but flew hastily upward, at the sound of the window being thrust
ajar, and opening in the middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.
A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for a
single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could hold
of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves. It seemed
greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to snatch
beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed downward
after it upon the pavement.
"What a pretty scene this is," thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, "and
how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature! The other doves
know her for a sister, I am sure."
Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all
events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which is
heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will always
die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward. Higher, and higher still;
and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in their
narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs of the
city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces. Only the domes of
churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses on
a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome, the
column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its summit,
the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.
Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access to
the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was a
door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement of
her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting no
response, she lifted the latch and entered.
"What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!" she,
exclaimed. "You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome; and
even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
nearest neighbors. I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp alight
before the Virgin's shrine."
"No, no, Miriam!" said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet her
friend. "You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even a
daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
you are to climb into my dove-cote!"
"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
should think there were three hundred stairs at least."
"But it will do you good," continued Hilda. "A height of some fifty feet
above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get from
fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
tower, in the faith that I should float upward."
"O, pray don't try it!" said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
come down among us again."
This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which it is
possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her tower, as
free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city beneath, as one
of her companion doves to fly downward into the street;--all alone,
perfectly independent, under her own sole guardianship, unless watched
over by the Virgin, whose shrine she tended; doing what she liked without
a suspicion or a shadow upon the snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs
of artist life bestow such liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere
restricted within so much narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication
that, whenever we admit women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions,
we must also,remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which
would then become an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The
system seems to work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as
in Hilda's, purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and
to be their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
other cities.
Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that were
seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest treasures
of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking, perhaps, the
reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with life, but so
softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to be looking at
humanity with angels' eyes. With years and experience she might be
expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which would impart to
her designs the relief they needed. Had Hilda remained in her own country,
it is not improbable that she might have produced original works worthy
to hang in that gallery of native art which, we hope, is destined to
extend its rich length through many future centuries. An orphan, however,
without near relatives, and possessed of a little property, she had found
it within her possibilities to come to Italy; that central clime, whither
the eyes and the heart of every artist turn, as if pictures could not be
made to glow in any other atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace
and expression, save in that land of whitest marble.
Hilda's gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her mild,
unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous city, even
like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little earth to grow in,
on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten. Here she dwelt,
in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but no home companion
except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous chamber contiguous
to her own. They soon became as familiar with the fair-haired Saxon girl
as if she were a born sister of their brood; and her customary white robe
bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage that the confraternity of
artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized her aerial apartment as the
Dovecote. And while the other doves flew far and wide in quest of what
was good for them, Hilda likewise spread her wings, and sought such
ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God ordains for creatures of her
kind.
We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it could
yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one. Certain it is,
that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to have
entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her thither.
No doubt the girl's early dreams had been of sending forms and hues of
beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling scenes of
poetry and history to live before men's eyes, through conceptions and by
methods individual to herself. But more and more, as she grew familiar
with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries in Rome, Hilda had
ceased to consider herself as an original artist. No, wonder that this
change should have befallen her. She was endowed with a deep and
sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of discerning and
worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure. No other person, it is
probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with such deep delight,
the pictorial wonders that were here displayed. She saw no, not saw, but
felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth
and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by
this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy, she went
straight to the central point, in which the master had conceived his work.
Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his own eyes, and hence her
comprehension of any picture that interested her was perfect.
This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda's physical
organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely delicate; and,
connected with this advantage, she had a command of hand, a nicety and
force of touch, which is an endowment separate from pictorial genius,
though indispensable to its exercise.
It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda's
case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of the
very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity with
the works of the mighty old masters. Reverencing these wonderful men so
deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her, too loyal,
too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling herself in
their society. Beholding the miracles of beauty which they had achieved,
the world seemed already rich enough in original designs, and nothing more
was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties more widely among
mankind. All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the fanciful ideas which
she had brought from home, of great pictures to be conceived in her
feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those most intimate with
her could discern, relinquished without a sigh. All that she would
henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say religiously was to
catch and reflect some of the glory which had been shed upon canvas from
the immortal pencils of old.
So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
these. Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious of
everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of copying
those mighty achievements. But, if they paused to look over her shoulder,
and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their eyes, they
soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old masters were
hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand. In truth, from
whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those spirits might
descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so gentle and pure
a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine touch to her
repetitions of their works.
Her copies were indeed marvellous. Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
a Chinese copy is accurate. Hilda's had that evanescent and ethereal
life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it is
as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to get the
very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble bust.
Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who spend a
lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a single
picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the indefinable
charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we understand the
difficulties of the task which they undertake.
It was not Hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of a
great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion of it,
in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the Virgin's
celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued with immortal
light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying face,--and these
would be rendered with her whole soul. If a picture had darkened into an
indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been injured by
cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to possess the
faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory. The copy would come from her
hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which the old master
had left upon the original in bestowing his final and most ethereal touch.
In some instances even (at least, so those believed who best appreciated
Hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled to execute what the
great master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly
succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely not impossible when such
depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted by the delicate skill and
accuracy of her slender hand. In such cases the girl was but a finer
instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism,.by the help
of which the spirit of some great departed painter now first achieved his
ideal, centuries after his own earthly hand, that other tool, had turned
to dust.
Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove, as
her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome. After
minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
development of his idea. Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
called--attempt only a superficial imitation. Copies of the old masters
in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert
themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their performances,
it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless eye; but
working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the
surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable nothing, that
inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which
the picture gets its immortality. Hilda was no such machine as this; she
wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle.
It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
ideas. She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so little,
of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified some tastes
that were incapable of appreciating Raphael. But this could be done only
by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of the spectator.
She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish part, laying her
individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring remembrance, at the
feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved and venerated; and
therefore the world was the richer for this feeble girl.
Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within itself,
she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion, and multiplied
it for mankind. From the dark, chill corner of a gallery,--from some
curtained chapel in a church, where the light came seldom and aslant,
--from the prince's carefully guarded cabinet, where not one eye in
thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the wondrous picture
into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the enjoyment of the
world. Hilda's faculty of genuine admiration is one of the rarest to be
found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her in kind by
admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble magnanimity in
choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor
enchantress within a circle of her own.
The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin's love! Would it
have been worth Hilda's while to relinquish this office for the sake of
giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
feminine achievements in literature!
CHAPTER VII
BEATRICE
Miriam was glad to find the Dove in her turret-home; for being endowed
with an infinite activity, and taking exquisite delight in the sweet labor
of which her life was full, it was Hilda's practice to flee abroad betimes,
and haunt the galleries till dusk. Happy were those (but they were very
few) whom she ever chose to be the companions of her day; they saw the art
treasures of Rome, under her guidance, as they had never seen them before.
Not that Hilda could dissertate, or talk learnedly about pictures; she
would probably have been puzzled by the technical terms of her own art.
Not that she had much to say about what she most profoundly admired; but
even her silent sympathy was so powerful that it drew your own along with
it, endowing you with a second-sight that enabled you to see excellences
with almost the depth and delicacy of her own perceptions.
All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight.
Unconsciously, the poor child had become one of the spectacles of the
Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her easel
among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and the
shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of
copyists. The old custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their
own child. Sometimes a young artist, instead of going on with a copy of
the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich his canvas
with an original portrait of Hilda at her work. A lovelier subject could
not have been selected, nor one which required nicer skill and insight in
doing it anything like justice. She was pretty at all times, in our
native New England style, with her light-brown ringlets, her delicately
tinged, but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent, yet most feminine
and kindly face. But, every few moments, this pretty and girlish face
grew beautiful and striking, as some inward thought and feeling brightened,
rose to the surface, and then, as it were, passed out of sight again; so
that, taking into view this constantly recurring change, it really seemed
as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine of her soul.
In other respects, she was a good subject for a portrait, being
distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps unconsciously
bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as artists seldom fail
to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an inhabitant of
pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled, nor even
approached too closely. In her feminine self, Hilda was natural, and of
pleasant deportment, endowed with a mild cheerfulness of temper, not
overflowing with animal spirits, but never long despondent. There was a
certain simplicity that made every one her friend, but it was combined
with a subtile attribute of reserve, that insensibly kept those at a
distance who were not suited to her sphere.
Miriam was the dearest friend whom she had ever known. Being a year or
two the elder, of longer acquaintance with Italy, and better fitted to
deal with its crafty and selfish inhabitants, she had helped Hilda to
arrange her way of life, and had encouraged her through those first weeks,
when Rome is so dreary to every newcomer.
"But how lucky that you are at home today," said Miriam, continuing the
conversation which was begun, many pages back. "I hardly hoped to find
you, though I had a favor to ask,--a commission to put into your charge.
But what picture is this?"
"See! "said Hilda, taking her friend's hand, and leading her in front of
the easel. "I wanted your opinion of it."
"If you have really succeeded," observed Miriam, recognizing the picture
at the first glance, "it will be the greatest miracle you have yet
achieved."
The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish,
perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which
strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance of
auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the
spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape.
There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so
that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The
whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any single
feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not cheerful, or
why a single touch of the artist's pencil should not brighten it into
joyousness. But, in fact, it was the very saddest picture ever painted or
conceived; it involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which
came to the observer by a sort of intuition. It was a sorrow that removed
this beautiful girl out of the sphere of humanity, and set her in a
far-off region, the remoteness of which--while yet her face is so close
before us--makes us shiver as at a spectre.
"Yes, Hilda," said her friend, after closely examining the picture," you
have done nothing else so wonderful as this. But by what unheard-of
solicitations or secret interest have you obtained leave to copy Guido's
Beatrice Cenci? It is an unexampled favor; and the impossibility of
getting a genuine copy has filled the Roman picture shops with Beatrices,
gay, grievous, or coquettish, but never a true one among them."
"There has been one exquisite copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by an
artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was Thompson,
who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the rest of us) to
set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince Barberini would
be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but to sit down before the
picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart. I do believe it
is now photographed there. It is a sad face to keep so close to one's
heart; only what is so very beautiful can never be quite a pain. Well;
after studying it in this way, I know not how many times, I came home, and
have done my best to transfer the image to canvas."
"Here it is, then," said Miriam, contemplating Hilda's work with great
interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture
excited. "Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos,
engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the
poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if she
were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other modes
of fantastic mistake. But here is Guido's very Beatrice; she that slept
in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And now that
you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling is, that gives
this picture such a mysterious force? For my part, though deeply sensible
of its influence, I cannot seize it."
"Nor can I, in words," replied her friend. "But while I was painting her,
I felt all the time as if she were trying to escape from my gaze. She
knows that her sorrow is so strange and so immense, that she ought to be
solitary forever, both for the world's sake and her own; and this is the
reason we feel such a distance between Beatrice and ourselves, even when
our eyes meet hers. It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet her glance,
and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; neither does
she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of her case better than
we do. She is a fallen angel,--fallen, and yet sinless; and it is only
this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that keeps her down
upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it sets her beyond
our reach."
"You deem her sinless?" asked Miriam; "that is not so plain to me. If I
can pretend to see at all into that dim region, whence she gazes so
strangely and sadly at us, Beatrice's own conscience does not acquit her
of something evil, and never to be forgiven!"
"Sorrow so black as hers oppresses her very nearly as sin would," said
Hilda.
"Then," inquired Miriam, "do you think that there was no sin in the deed
for which she suffered?"
"Ah!" replied Hilda, shuddering," I really had quite forgotten Beatrice's
history, and was thinking of her only as the picture seems to reveal her
character. Yes, yes; it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable crime, and she
feels it to be so. Therefore it is that the forlorn creature so longs to
elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into nothingness! Her doom is
just!"
"O Hilda, your innocence is like a sharp steel sword!" exclaimed her
friend. "Your judgments are often terribly severe, though you seem all
made up of gentleness and mercy. Beatrice's sin may not have been so
great: perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the
circumstances. If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her
nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her. Ah!" continued
Miriam passionately, "if I could only get within her consciousness!--if I
could but clasp Beatrice Cenci's ghost, and draw it into myself! I would
give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the one
great criminal since time began."
As Miriam gave utterance to these words, Hilda looked from the picture
into her face, and was startled to observe that her friend's expression
had become almost exactly that of the pottrait; as if her passionate wish
and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice's mystery had been successful.
"O, for Heaven's sake, Miriam, do not look so!" she cried. "What an
actress you are! And I never guessed it before. Ah! now you are yourself
again!" she added, kissing her. "Leave Beatrice to me in future."
"Cover up your magical picture, then," replied her friend, "else I never
can look away from it. It is strange, dear Hilda, how an innocent,
delicate, white soul like yours has been able to seize the subtle mystery
of this portrait; as you surely must, in order to reproduce it so
perfectly. Well; we will not talk of it any more. Do you know, I have
come to you this morning on a small matter of business. Will you
undertake it for me?"
"O, certainly," said Hilda, laughing; "if you choose to trust me with
business."
"Nay, it is not a matter of any difficulty," answered Miriam; "merely to
take charge of this packet, and keep it for me awhile."
"But why not keep it yourself?" asked Hilda.
"Partly because it will be safer in your charge," said her friend. "I am
a careless sort of person in ordinary things; while you, for all you dwell
so high above the world, have certain little housewifely ways of accuracy
and order. The packet is of some slight importance; and yet, it may be,
I shall not ask you for it again. In a week or two, you know, I am
leaving Rome. You, setting at defiance the malarial fever, mean to stay
here and haunt your beloved galleries through the summer. Now, four
months hence, unless you hear more from me, I would have you deliver the
packet according to its address."
Hilda read the direction; it was to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Plazzo
Cenci, third piano.
"I will deliver it with my own hand," said she, "precisely four months
from to-day, unless you bid me to the contrary. Perhaps I shall meet the
ghost of Beatrice in that grim old palace of her forefathers."
"In that case," rejoined Miriam, "do not fail to speak to her, and try to
win her confidence. Poor thing! she would be all the better for pouring
her heart out freely, and would be glad to do it, if she were sure of
sympathy. It irks my brain and heart to think of her, all shut up within
herself." She withdrew the cloth that Hilda had drawn over the picture,
and took another long look at it. "Poor sister Beatrice! for she was
still a woman, Hilda, still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what they might.
How well you have done it, Hilda! I knot not whether Guido will thank
you, or be jealous of
your rivalship."
"Jealous, indeed!" exclaimed Hilda. "If Guido had not wrought through me,
my pains would have been thrown away."
"After all," resumed Miriam, "if a woman had painted the original picture,
there might have been something in it which we miss now. I have a great
mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what it lacks. Well;
goodby. But, stay! I am going for a little airing to the grounds of the
Villa Borghese this afternoon. You will think it very foolish, but I
always feel the safer in your company, Hilda, slender little maiden as you
are. Will you come?"
"Ah, not to-day, dearest Miriam," she replied; "I have set my heart on
giving another touch or two to this picture, and shall not stir abroad
till nearly sunset."
"Farewell, then," said her visitor. "I leave you in your dove-cote. What
a sweet, strange life you lead here; conversing with the souls of the old
masters, feeding and fondling your sister doves, and trimming the Virgin's
lamp! Hilda, do you ever pray to the Virgin while you tend her shrine?"
"Sometimes I have been moved to do so," replied the Dove, blushing, and
lowering her eyes; "she was a woman once. Do you think it would be
wrong?"
"Nay, that is for you to judge," said Miriam; "but when you pray next,
dear friend, remember me!"
She went down the long descent of the lower staircase, and just as she
reached the street the flock of doves again took their hurried flight from
the pavement to the topmost window. She threw her eyes upward and beheld
them hovering about Hilda's head; for, after her friend's departure, the
girl had been more impressed than before by something very sad and
troubled in her manner. She was, therefore, leaning forth from her airy
abode, and flinging down a kind, maidenly kiss, and a gesture of farewell,
in the hope that these might alight upon Miriam's heart, and comfort its
unknown sorrow a little. Kenyon the sculptor, who chanced to be passing
the head of the street, took note of that ethereal kiss, and wished that
he could have caught it in the air and got Hilda's leave to keep it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SUBURBAN VILLA
Donatello, while it was still a doubtful question betwixt afternoon and
morning, set forth to keep the appointment which Miriam had carelessly
tendered him in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The entrance to these
grounds (as all my readers know, for everybody nowadays has been in Rome)
is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. Passing beneath that not very
impressive specimen of Michael Angelo's architecture, a minute's walk will
transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones of the Roman
pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence a little farther
stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful seclusion. A seclusion,
but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and populace, stranger and
native, all who breathe Roman air, find free admission, and come hither to
taste the languid enjoyment of the day-dream that they call life.
But Donatello's enjoyment was of a livelier kind. He soon began to draw
long and delightful breaths among those shadowy walks. Judging by the
pleasure which the sylvan character of the scene excited in him, it might
be no merely fanciful theory to set him down as the kinsman, not far
remote, of that wild, sweet, playful, rustic creature, to whose marble
image he bore so striking a resemblance. How mirthful a discovery would
it be (and yet with a touch of pathos in it), if the breeze which sported
fondly with his clustering locks were to waft them suddenly aside, and
show a pair of leaf-shaped, furry ears! What an honest strain of wildness
would it indicate! and into what regions of rich mystery would it extend
Donatello's sympathies, to be thus linked (and by no monstrous chain) with
what we call the inferior trioes of being, whose simplicity, mingled with
his human intelligence, might partly restore what man has lost of the
divine!
The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself in
the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a brighter
sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable trees,
than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western world.
The ilex-trees, so ancient and time-honored were they, seemed to have
lived for ages undisturbed, and to feel no dread of profanation by the axe
any more than overthrow by the thunder-stroke. It had already passed out
of their dreamy old memories that only a few years ago they were
grievously imperilled by the Gaul's last assault upon the walls of Rome.
As if confident in the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed
attitudes of indolent repose. They leaned over the green turf in
ponderous grace, throwing abroad their great branches without danger of
interfering with other trees, though other majestic trees grew near enough
for dignified society, but too distant for constraint. Never was there a
more venerable quietude than that which slept among their sheltering
boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that now gladdening the gentle gloom
which these leafy patriarchs strove to diffuse over the swelling and
subsiding lawns.
In other portions of the grounds the stone-pines lifted their dense clump
of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they looked like
green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the turf so far off
that you hardly knew which tree had made it. Again, there were avenues
of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral candles, which spread
dusk and twilight round about them instead of cheerful radiance. The more
open spots were all abloom, even so early in the season, with anemones of
wondrous size, both white and rose-colored, and violets that betrayed
themselves by their rich fragrance, even if their blue eyes failed to meet
your own. Daisies, too, were abundant, but larger than the modest little
English flower, and therefore of small account.
These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest of
English park scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the neglect
that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since man seldom
interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way and makes herself
at home. There is enough of human care, it is true, bestowed, long ago
and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing into deformity; and
the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene that seems to have been
projected out of the poet's mind. If the ancient Faun were other than a
mere creation of old poetry, and could have reappeared anywhere, it must
have been in such a scene as this.
In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there
with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and
broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin
on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass
grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root
themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and
clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth
summer since their winged seeds alighted there.
What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial ruins
in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive imitations,
wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples and palaces,
are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be
venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely,
dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in
these princely villa-residences in the neighborhood of Rome; a scene that
must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and
man's intelligence wrought kindly together, to render it so gently wild as
we behold it now.
The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,
thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early
spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human
being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades
in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits
you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its
loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the
scope of man's actual possessions. But Donatello felt nothing of this
dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot. As he passed among the sunny
shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity. The flicker of the
sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain's gush, the dance of the leaf upon
the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness, the old sylvan
peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long breaths which he
drew.
The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which he
had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and
decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy
incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow streets,
among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the sense of
these things rose from the young man's consciousness like a cloud which
had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.
He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as by
an exhilarating wine. He ran races with himself along the gleam and
shadow of the wood-paths. He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of
an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had
flown thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the trunk
of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of affection
and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his arms, as a
Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph, whom
antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind. Then, in
order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which his kindred
instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full length on the
turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and daisies, which
kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden fashion.
While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue lizards,
who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that absorbed the
warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with their small feet;
and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and sang their little
roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they recognized him, it may
be, as something akin to themselves, or else they fancied that he was
rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature dreaded him no more
in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and grass and flowers had long
since covered his dead body, converting it back to the sympathies from
which human existence had estranged it.
All of us, after a long abode in cities, have felt the blood gush more
joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could
feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in the
sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the mouldy
gloom and dim splendor of old Rome. Nature has been shut out for
numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had
latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except for what
blades of grass spring out of the pavements of the less trodden piazzas,
or what weeds cluster and tuft themselves on the cornices of ruins.
Therefore his joy was like that of a child that had gone astray from home,
and finds him suddenly in his mother's arms again.
At last, deeming it full time for Miriam to keep her tryst, he climbed to
the tiptop of the tallest tree, and thence looked about him, swaying to
and fro in the gentle breeze, which was like the respiration of that great
leafy, living thing. Donatello saw beneath him the whole circuit of the
enchanted ground; the statues and columns pointing upward from among the
shrubbery, the fountains flashing in the sunlight, the paths winding
hither and thither, and continually finding out some nook of new and
ancient pleasantness. He saw the villa, too, with its marble front
incrusted all over with basreliefs, and statues in its many niches. It
was as beautiful as a fairy palace, and seemed an abode in which the lord
and lady of this fair domain might fitly dwell, and come forth each
morning to enjoy as sweet a life as their happiest dreams of the past
night could have depicted. All this he saw, but his first glance had
taken in too wide a sweep, and it was not till his eyes fell almost
directly beneath him, that Donatello beheld Miriam just turning into the
path that led across the roots of his very tree.
He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come close to the trunk,
and then suddenly dropped from an impending bough, and alighted at her
side. It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray of sunlight
through. The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy meditations
that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of her face,
while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance.
"I hardly know," said she, smiling, "whether you have sprouted out of the
earth, or fallen from the clouds. In either case you are welcome."
And they walked onward together.
CHAPTER IX
THE FAUN AND NYMPH
Mirian's sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello s
spirits. It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would otherwise
have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as heretofore,
in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and in those
Arcadian woods. He was silent for a while; it being, indeed, seldom
Donatello's impulse to express himself copiously in words. His usual
modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture, the
instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play of his
features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion, would
speak volumes in a moment.
By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam's, and was reflected
back upon himself. He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along the
wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace. Often,
too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then stood to
watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered path.
With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer and nearer
presence by what might be thought an extravagance of gesticulation, but
which doubtless was the language of the natural man, though laid aside and
forgotten by other men, now that words have been feebly substituted in the
place of signs and symbols. He gave Miriam the idea of a being not
precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and beautiful sense, an
animal, a creature in a state of development less than what mankind has
attained, yet the more perfect within itself for that very deficiency.
This idea filled her mobile imagination with agreeable fantasies, which,
after smiling at them herself, she tried to cofivey to the young man.
"What are you, my friend?" she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol. "If you are, in good
truth, that wild and pleasant creature whose face you wear, pray make me
known to your kindred. They will be found hereabouts, if anywhere. Knock
at the rough rind of this ilex-tree, and summon forth the Dryad! Ask the
water-nymph to rise dripping from yonder fountain, and exchange a moist
pressure of the hand with me! Do not fear that I shall shrink; even if
one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come capering on his
goat-legs out of the haunts of far antiquity, and propose to dance with me
among these lawns! And will not Bacchus,--with whom you consorted so
familiarly of old, and who loved you so well,--will he not meet us here,
and squeeze rich grapes into his cup for you and me?"
Donatello smiled; he laughed heartily, indeed, in sympathy with the mirth
that gleamed out of Miriam's deep, dark eyes. But he did not seem quite
to understand her mirthful talk, nor to be disposed to explain what kind
of creature he was, or to inquire with what divine or poetic kindred his
companion feigned to link him. He appeared only to know that Miriam was
beautiful, and that she smiled graciously upon him; that the present
moment was very sweet, and himself most happy, with the sunshine, the
sylvan scenery, and woman's kindly charm, which it enclosed within its
small circumference. It was delightful to see the trust which he reposed
in Miriam, and his pure joy in her propinquity; he asked nothing, sought
nothing, save to be near the beloved object, and brimmed over with ecstasy
at that simple boon. A creature of the happy tribes below us sometimes
shows the capacity of this enjoyment; a man, seldom or never.
"Donatello," said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet not
without a shade of sorrow, "you seem very happy; what makes you so?"
"Because I love you!" answered Donatello.
He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural thing in
the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his simplicity,-
Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with no responding
emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits of Arcadia; and
come under a civil polity where young men might avow their passion with as
little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a similar purpose.
"Why should you love me, foolish boy?" said she. "We have no points of
sympathy at all. There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
world, than you and I!"
"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he. "Therefore I love you!
There needs no other reason."
Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might have
been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily
attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to
one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be. Perhaps,
On the other hand, his character needed the dark element, which it found
in her. The force and energy of will, that sometimes flashed through her
eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not improbably, the varying lights
and shadows of her temper, now so mirthful, and anon so sad with
mysterious gloom, had bewitched the youth. Analyze the matter as we may,
the reason assigned by Donatello himself was as satisfactory as we are
likely to attain.
Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed. He held
out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give back
again. And yet Donatello's heart was so fresh a fountain, that, had
Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found it
exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and brimmed
over from it. She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval epoch, when
some women have a taste for such refreshment. Even for her, however,
there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that prompted
Donatello's words and deeds; though, unless she caught them in precisely
the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of a maimed or
imperfectly developed intellect. Alternately, she almost admired, or
wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted from the deeper
appreciation. But it could not, she decided for herself, be other than an
innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by their different
paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the little pleasures
that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets and wood-anemones,
to-day.
Yet an impulse of rectitude impelled Miriam to give him what she still
held to be a needless warning against an imaginary peril.
"If you were wiser, Donatello, you would think me a dangerous person,"
said she, "If you follow my footsteps, they will lead you to no good. You
ought to be afraid of me."
"I would as soon think of fearing the air we breathe," he replied.
"And well you may, for it is full of malaria," said Miriam; she went on,
hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened
hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth,
where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried. "Those
who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do assure you.
Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has brought you from
your home among the Apennines,--some rusty old castle, I suppose, with a
village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of vineyards, fig-trees,
and olive orchards,--a sad mischance, I say, that has transported you to
my side. You have had a happy life hitherto, have you not, Donatello?"
"O, yes," answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective turn,
he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the past. "I
remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at a village
feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the old, ripened
wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter evenings; and to
devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches, cherries, and melons.
I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds and horses, and very
happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds that haunt the leafy
solitudes. But never half so happy as now!"
"In these delightful groves?" she asked.
"Here, and with you," answered Donatello. "Just as we are now."
"What a fulness of content in him! How silly, and how delightful!" said
Miriam to herself. Then addressing him again: "But, Donatello, how long
will this happiness last?"
"How long!" he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the
future than to remember the past. "Why should it have any end? How long!
Forever! forever! forever!"
"The child! the simpleton!" said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and
checking it as suddenly. "But is he a simpleton indeed? Here, in those
few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound
conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to bring.
He perplexes me,--yes, and bewitches me,--wild, gentle, beautiful
creature that he is! It is like playing with a young greyhound!"
Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of
them. Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in
feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness, blow
over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by it.
The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought to be
a forbidden one.
"Donatello," she hastily exclaimed, "for your own sake, leave me! It is
not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with me,
a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to none.
I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I must
choose, if I find you loving me too well!"
"I fear nothing!" said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes with
perfect trust. "I love always!"
"I speak in vain," thought Miriam within herself.
"Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality!
what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?
Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at least,
that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
Donatello himself,--for this one hour!"
And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.
Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility to
Miriam's gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and ever-varying
activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy, which clothed
itself in words that had little individual meaning, and in snatches of
song that seemed as natural as bird notes. Then they both laughed
together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes, and
laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove became
full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening to sing
cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little feathered
creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known him through
many summers.
"How close he stands to nature!" said Miriam, observing this pleasant
familiarity between her companion and the bird. "He shall make me as
natural as himself for this one hour."
As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more the
influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible and
impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy, yet fully
capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly compensates for
many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the darkness of a cavern,
she could sport madly in the sunshine before the cavern's mouth. Except
the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like Donatello's, there is no
merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to that of melancholy people
escaping from the dark region m which it is their custom to keep
themselves imprisoned.
So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello on his own ground. They ran
races with each other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they pelted
one another with early flowers, and gathering them up twined them with
green leaves into garlands for both their heads. They played together
like children, or creatures of immortal youth. So much had they flung
aside the sombre habitudes of daily life, that they seemed born to be
sportive forever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead of any
deeper joy. It was a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life, or, further
still, into the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with sin and
sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows that
bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.
"Hark!" cried Donatello, stopping short, as he was about to bind Miriam's
fair hands with flowers, and lead her along in triumph, "there is music
somewhere in the grove!"
"It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely," said Miriam, "playing on his pipe.
Let us go seek him, and make him puff out his rough cheeks and pipe his
merriest air! Come; the strain of music will guide us onward like a gayly
colored thread of silk."
"Or like a chain of flowers," responded Donatello, drawing her along by
that which he had twined. "This way!--Come!"
CHAPTER X
THE SYLVAN DANCE
As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
effaced from memory by another. In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung
herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty; in
Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand in hand
with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter, and yet akin
to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the ultimate
peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan creature
and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only this, Miriam
resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.
There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan character
as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would have
fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance freely
forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that which
rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the pebbly bottom
of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in the sunshine,
flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly disappearing in a
shower of rainbow drops.
As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there were
symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself out.
"Ah! Donatello," cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
"you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the woods;
while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook just now,
methought I had a peep at the pointed ears."
Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might break the spell, and snatch
away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many dreary
months.
"Dance! dance!" cried he joyously. "If we take breath, we shall be as
we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!"
They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats, on
which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant band,
such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp, a flute,
and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear, theperformers had
skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable harmony. It chanced
to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in the sun-scorched piazzas of
the city, or beneath the windows of some unresponsive palace, they had
bethought themselves to try the echoes of these woods; for, on the festas
of the Church, Rome scatters its merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the
dance or any other pastime.
As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl, with
bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round with tinkling
bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without interrupting his
brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched away this unmelodious
contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head, produced music of
indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step, and striking the
tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one jovial act.
It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least, in
the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very soon a
number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck into the dance,
singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with jollity. Among them
were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet bareheaded in the Roman
streets, with silver stilettos thrust through their glossy hair; the
contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the villages, with their rich and
picturesque costumes of scarlet and all bright hues, such as fairer
maidens might not venture to put on. Then came the modern Roman from
Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak drawn about him like a toga,
which anon, as his active motion heated him, he flung aside. Three French
soldiers capered freely into the throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their
short swords dangling at their sides; and three German artists in gray
flaccid hats and flaunting beards; and one of the Pope's Swiss guardsmen
in the strange motley garb which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two
young English tourists (one of them a lord) took contadine partners and
dashed in, as did also a shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like
rustic Pan in person, and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above
there was a herdsman or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in
sky-blue jackets, and small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees;
haggard and sallow were these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and
nothing but the malaria to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary
spirit and joined hands in Donatello's dance.
Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them together
in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old bosom of the
earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole exception to
the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was seen in a
countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and declined to
compromise his dignity by making part of it.
The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his bow
back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in quick
puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his head, and
led the merry throng with unweariable steps. As they followed one another
in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one of those
bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals is twined
around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the sculptured scene
on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as often as any other
device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and white bones that are
treasured up within. You might take it for a marriage pageant; but after
a while, if you look at these merry-makers, following them from end to end
of the marble coffin, you doubt whether their gay movement is leading them
to a happy close. A youth has suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is
overturned and broken, flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a
maiden seems to have grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of
a friend. Always some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust
sidelong into the spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can
look no more at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to
this one slightly suggested doom and sorrow.
As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
wild dance which we have been describing. In the midst of its madness and
riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure that
shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on its
tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself. It was the
model.
A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
dance. He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside the
stone bench on which Miriam was sitting. But a strange distance and
unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
which she regarded him.
"Come back!" cried he. "Why should this happy hour end so soon?"
"It must end here, Donatello," said she, in answer to his words and
outstretched hand; "and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
themselves in a lifetime. Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
quietly among the shadows of these trees. See, the companions of our
pastime are vanishing already!"
Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of tune,
or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had ceased,
and the dancers come abruptly to a pause. All that motley throng of
rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together. In
Miriam's remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy. It was as if a
company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them, had
been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment ago; and
now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at them too
closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth, the sylvan
pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers lingered
among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under the garb
and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the weary
commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia and the
Golden Age. The spell being broken, it was now only that old tract of
pleasure ground, close by the people's gat:e of Rome,--a tract where the
crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood recklessly poured
out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the soil, creating an
influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.
"You must leave me," said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
before; "have I not said it? Go; and look not behind you."
"Miriam," whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, "who is it that
stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?"
"Hush; leave me!" repeated Miriam. "Your hour is past; his hour has
come."
Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and the
expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered, perhaps
with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible repugnance,--that
Miriam hardly knew him. His lips were drawn apart so as to disclose his
set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage, which we seldom see
except in persons of the simplest and rudest natures. A shudder seemed to
pass through his very bones.
"I hate him!" muttered he.
"Be satisfied; I hate him too!" said Miriam.
She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to it
by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
strongly expressed by Donatello. Two drops of water or of blood do not
more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.
"Shall I clutch him by the throat?" whispered Donatello, with a savage
scowl. "Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever."
"In Heaven's name, no violence!" exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by the
fierceness that he so suddenly developed. "O, have pity on me, Donatello,
if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my wretchedness I let
myself be your playmate for this one wild hour! Follow me no farther.
Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear friend,--kind, simple, loving
friend,--make me not more wretched by the remembrance of having thrown
fierce hates or loves into the wellspring of your happy life!"
"Not follow you!" repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness of
her voice,--"not follow you! What other path have I?"
"We will talk of it once again," said Miriam still soothingly;
"soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now."
CHAPTER XI
FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,
there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.
A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them. It perhaps symbolized
a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and
building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other
currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one of
the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a
great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of the
other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic medium
betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.
Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of
their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings of what
passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister personage
who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the catacomb. In
weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a
task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up and piecing
together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and scattered to the
winds. Many words of deep significance, many entire sentences, and those
possibly the most important ones, have flown too far on the winged breeze
to be recovered. If we insert our own conjectural amendments, we perhaps
give a purport utterly at variance with the true one. Yet unless we
attempt something in this way, there must remain an unsightly gap, and a
lack of continuousness and dependence in our narrative; so that it would
arrive at certain inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their
imminence.
Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious
fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam; it was
such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes exercise
upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness with which
being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned herself to the
thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of which some of the
massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others in his
ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by a bond
equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such unhallowed
furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil deeds.
Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only one of
those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles propounded to
mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every crime is made to be
the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of the single guilty one.
It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance
which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.
"You follow me too closely," she said, in low, faltering accents; "you
allow me too scanty room to draw my breath. Do you know what will be the
end of this?" "I know well what must be the end," he replied.
"Tell me, then," said Miriam, "that I may compare your foreboding with my
own. Mine is a very dark one."
"There can be but one result, and that soon," answered the model. "You
must throw off your present mask and assume another. You must vanish out
of the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow you.
It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence in my
bidding. You are aware of the penalty of a refusal."
"Not that penalty with which you would terrify me," said Miriam; "another
there may be, but not so grievous." "What is that other?" he inquired.
"Death! simply death!" she answered. "Death," said her persecutor, "is
not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. You are strong and
warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit is, these many
months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold you, have scarcely
made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood. Miriam,--for I
forbear to speak another name, at which these leaves would shiver above
our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!"
"Might not a dagger find my heart?" said she, for the first time meeting
his eyes. "Would not poison make an end of me? Will not the Tiber drown
me?"
"It might," he answered; "for I allow that you are mortal. But, Miriam,
believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to be
sinned and suffered in the world. We have a destiny which we must needs
fulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I was as anxious
as yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in a fathomless
grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, until you confront
me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine what steps I took to
render all this secure; and what was the result? Our strange interview in
the bowels of the earth convinced me of the futility of my design."
"Ah, fatal chance!" cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.
"Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me," rejoined he;
"but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!"
"Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled down upon
us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?" cried Miriam, in a
burst of vehement passion. "O, that we could have wandered in those
dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in the
darkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last.breaths might not
mingle!"
"It were vain to wish it," said the model. "In all that labyrinth of
midnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or die
together. Our fates cross and are entangled. The threads are twisted
into a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could the knots
be severed, we might escape. But neither can your slender fingers untie
these knots, nor my masculine force break them. We must submit!"
"Pray for rescue, as I have," exclaimed Miriam. "Pray for deliverance
from me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine. Dark as your life has
been, I have known you to pray in times past!"
At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon her
persecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes. In
this man's memory there was something that made it awful for him to think
of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to be reminded
of such divine comfort and succor as await pious souls merely for the
asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a native temperament deeply
susceptible of religious impressions, but which had been wronged, violated,
and debased, until, at length, it was capable only of terror from the
sources that were intended for our purest and loftiest consolation. He
looked so fearfully at her, and with such intense pain struggling in his
eyes, that Miriam felt pity.
And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad. It was an idea
that had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soon as
suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances that lay within
her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil fortune, that, whether mad
or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likely to be used
only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.
I would not give you pain," she said, soothingly; "your faith allows you
the consolations of penance and absolution. Try what help there may be in
these, and leave me to myself."
"Do not think it, Miriam," said he; "we are bound together, and can never
part again." "Why should it seem so impossible?" she rejoined. "Think
how I had escaped from all the past! I had made for myself a new sphere,
and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes and enjoyments. My
heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had been no
miserable life behind me. The human spirit does not perish of a single
wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life. Let us but keep
asunder, and all may go well for both." "We fancied ourselves forever
sundered," he replied. "Yet we met once, in the bowels of the earth; and,
were we to part now, our fates would fling us together again in a desert,
on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest. You speak in vain,
therefore."
"You mistake your own will for an iron necessity," said Miriam; "otherwise,
you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost, when we met
among those ghosts of ancient days. Even now you might bid me pass as
freely."
"Never!" said he, with unmitigable will; "your reappearance has destroyed
the work of years. You know the power that I have over you. Obey my
bidding; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: nor will I cease
to haunt you till the moment comes."
"Then," said Miriam more calmly," I foresee the end, and have already
warned you of it. It will be death!"
"Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?" he asked, looking fixedly at her.
"Do you imagine me a murderess?" said she, shuddering; "you, at least,
have no right to think me so!"
"Yet," rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, "men have said that
this white hand had once a crimson stain." He took her hand as he spoke,
and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothing
short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it. Holding it up to
the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees), he
appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginary
blood-stain with which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. "It
looks very white," said he; "but I have known hands as white, which all
the water in the ocean would not have washed clean."
"It had no stain," retorted Miriam bitterly, "until you grasped it in your
own."
The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.
They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued to make
reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of their former
life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and youthful
woman whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the breath that uttered
them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood. Yet, how
can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach to Miriam!
Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be subjected to a
thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre, whom she herself
had evoked out of the darkness! Be this as it might, Miriam, we have
reason to believe, still continued to beseech him, humbly, passionately,
wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free to follow her own sad path.
Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghese
grounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised her
eyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyond
its limits. As they came within public observation, her persecutor fell
behind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed during
their solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life. The
merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were now
thronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a
travelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and was
passing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house. In the
broad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.
But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way through this flood of
human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside. With a sad
kind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrant
undetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching him
for freedom, and in vain.
CHAPTER XII
A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
Hilda, after giving the last touches to the picture of Beatrice Cenci, had
flown down from her dove-cote, late in the afternoon, and gone to the
Pincian Hill, in the hope of hearing a strain or two of exhilarating music.
There, as it happened, she met the sculptor, for, to say the truth,
Kenyon had well noted the fair artist's ordinary way of life, and was
accustomed to shape his own movements so as to bring him often within her
sphere.
The Pincian Hill is the favorite promenade of the Roman aristocracy. At
the present day, however, like most other Roman possessions, it belongs
less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians from Gaul, Great
Britain, anti beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation
over whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City. These
foreign guests are indeed ungrateful, if they do not breathe a prayer for
Pope Clement, or whatever Holy Father it may have been, who levelled the
summit of the mount so skilfully, and bounded it with the parapet of the
city wall; who laid out those broad walks and drives, and overhung them
with the deepening shade of many kinds of tree; who scattered the flowers,
of all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green, central
lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great basins of
marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to the brim;
who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had long hidden
it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues, and crowned
them with busts of that multitude of worthies--statesmen, heroes, artists,
men of letters and of song--whom the whole world claims as its chief
ornaments, though Italy produced them all. In a word, the Pincian garden
is one of the things that reconcile the stranger (since he fully
appreciates the enjoyment, and feels nothing of the cost) to the rule of
an irresponsible dynasty of Holy Fathers, who seem to have aimed at making
life as agreeable an affair as it can well be.
In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to be
seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers or the
Crimea on their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of seeing
that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful lover
rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved one's hair.
Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the treacherous sunshine)
the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought her, for cure, to a
climate that instils poison into its very purest breath. Here, all day,
come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English babies, or guiding the
footsteps of little travellers from the far Western world. Here, in the
sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds of equipages, from the
cardinal's old-fashioned and gorgeous purple carriage to the gay barouche
of modern date. Here horsemen gallop on thoroughbred steeds. Here, in
short, all the transitory population of Rome, the world's great
watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades! Here are beautiful sunsets;
and here, whichever way you turn your eyes, are scenes as well worth
gazing at, both in themselves and for their historic interest, as any that
the sun ever rose and set upon. Here, too, on certain afternoons of the
week, a French military band flings out rich music over the poor old city,
floating her with strains as loud as those of her own echoless triumphs.
Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng of
promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music. They
strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment of
the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down by its
own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work that
men's hands ever piled together. In the blue distance rose Soracte, and
other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but look
scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so much,
they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream. These,
nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome, and its
wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest page of
history, crowded so full with memorable events that one obliterates
another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own records till they
grew illegible.
But, not to meddle with history,--with which our narrative is no otherwise
concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is historic, and inevitably
settles on our page and mingles with our ink,--we will return to our two
friends, who were still leaning over the wall. Beneath them lay the broad
sweep of the Borghese grounds, covered with trees, amid which appeared the
white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of an upspringing
fountain, all to be overshadowed at a later period of the year by the
thicker growth of foliage.
The advance of vegetation, in this softer climate, is less abrupt than the
inhabitant of the cold North is accustomed to observe. Beginning earlier,
--even in February,--Spring is not compelled to burst into Summer with
such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each opening beauty, and
to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the sweet youth and freshness
of the year; it gives us its. maiden charm, before, settling into the
married Summer, which, again, does not so soon sober itself into matronly
Autumn. In our own country, the virgin Spring hastens to its bridal too
abruptly. But here, after a month or two of kindly growth, the leaves of
the young trees, which cover that portion of the Borghese grounds nearest
the city wall, were still in their tender halfdevelopment.
In the remoter depths, among the old groves of ilex-trees, Hilda and
Kenyon heard the faint sound of music, laughter, and mingling voices. It
was probably the uproar--spreading even so far as the walls of Rome, and
growing faded and melancholy in its passage--of that wild sylvan merriment,
which we have already attempted to describe. By and by it
ceased--although the two listeners still tried to distinguish it between
the bursts of nearer music from the military band. But there was no
renewal of that distant mirth. Soon afterwards they saw a solitary figure
advancing along one of the paths that lead from the obscurer part of the
ground towards the gateway.
"Look! is it not Donatello?" said Hilda.
"He it is, beyond a doubt," replied the sculptor. "But how gravely he
walks, and with what long looks behind him! He seems either very weary,
or very sad. I should not hesitate to call it sadness, if Donatello were
a creature capable of the sin and folly of low spirits. In all these
hundred paces, while we have been watching him, he has not made one of
those little caprioles in the air which are characteristic of his natural
gait. I begin to doubt whether he is a veritable Faun."
"Then," said Hilda, with perfect simplicity, "you have thought him--and do
think him--one of that strange, wild, happy race of creatures, that used
to laugh and sport in the woods, in the old, old times? So do I, indeed!
But I never quite believed, till now, that fauns existed anywhere but in
poetry."
The sculptor at first merely smiled. Then, as the idea took further
possession of his mind, he laughed outright, and wished from the bottom of
his heart (being in love with Hilda, though he had never told her so) that
he could have rewarded or punished her for its pretty absurdity with a
kiss.
"O Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide
under that little straw hat!" cried he, at length. "A Faun! a Faun!
Great Pan is not dead, then, after all! The whole tribe of mythical
creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl's fancy, and
find it a lovelier abode and play-place, I doubt not, than their Arcadian
haunts of yore. What bliss, if a man of marble, like myself, could stray
thither, too!"
"Why do you laugh so?" asked Hilda, reddening; for she was a little
disturbed at Kenyon's ridicule, however kindly expressed. "What can I
have said, that you think so very foolish?"
"Well, not foolish, then," rejoined the sculptor, "but wiser, it may be,
than I can fathom. Really, however, the idea does strike one as
delightfully fresh, when we consider Donatello's position and external
environment. Why, my dear Hilda, he is a Tuscan born, of an old noble
race in that part of Italy; and he has a moss-grown tower among the
Apennines, where he and his forefathers have dwelt, under their own vines
and fig-trees, from an unknown antiquity. His boyish passion for Miriam
has introduced him familiarly to our little circle; and our republican and
artistic simplicity of intercourse has included this young Italian, on the
same terms as one of ourselves. But, if we paid due respect to rank and
title, we should bend reverentially to Donatello, and salute him as his
Excellency the Count di Monte Beni."
"That is a droll idea, much droller than his being a Faun!" said Hilda,
laughing in her turn. "This does not quite satisfy me, however,
especially as you yourself recognized and acknowledged his wonderful
resemblance to the statue."
"Except as regards the pointed ears," said Kenyon; adding, aside, "and one
other little peculiarity, generally observable in the statues of fauns."
"As for his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni's ears," replied Hilda,
smiling again at the dignity with which this title invested their playful
friend, "you know we could never see their shape, on account of his
clustering curls. Nay, I remember, he once started back, as shyly as a
wild deer, when Miriam made a pretence of examining them. How do you
explain that?"
"O, I certainly shall not contend against such a weight of evidence, the
fact of his faunship being otherwise so probable," answered the sculptor,
still hardly retaining his gravity. "Faun or not, Donatello or the Count
di Monte Beni--is a singularly wild creature, and, as I have remarked on
other occasions, though very gentle, does not love to be touched.
Speaking in no harsh sense, there is a great deal of animal nature in him,
as if he had been born in the woods, and had run wild all his childhood,
and were as yet but imperfectly domesticated. Life, even in our day, is
very simple and unsophisticated in some of the shaggy nooks of the
Apennines."
"It annoys me very much," said Hilda, "this inclination, which most people
have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out of everything. Why
could not you allow me--and yourself, too--the satisfaction of thinking
him a Faun?"
"Pray keep your belief, dear Hilda, if it makes you any happier," said the
sculptor; "and I shall do my best to become a convert. Donatello has
asked me to spend the summer with him, in his ancestral tower, where I
purpose investigating the pedigree of these sylvan counts, his forefathers;
and if their shadows beckon me into dreamland, I shall willingly follow.
By the bye, speaking of Donatello, there is a point on which I should like
to be enlightened."
"Can I help you, then?" said Hilda, in answer to his look.
"Is there the slightest chance of his winning Miriam's affections?"
suggested Kenyon.
"Miriam! she, so accomplished and gifted!" exclaimed Hilda; "and he, a
rude, uncultivated boy! No, no, no!"
"It would seem impossible," said the sculptor. "But, on the other hand, a
gifted woman flings away her affections so unaccountably, sometimes!
Miriam of late has been very morbid and miserable, as we both know. Young
as she is, the morning light seems already to have faded out of her life;
and now comes Donatello, with natural sunshine enough for himself and her,
and offers her the opportunity of making her heart and life all new and
cheery again. People of high intellectual endowments do not require
similar ones in those they love. They are just the persons to appreciate
the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest affection, the simple
joy, the fulness of contentment with what he loves, which Miriam sees in
Donatello. True; she may call him a simpleton. It is a necessity of the
case; for a man loses the capacity for this kind of affection, in
proportion as he cultivates and refines himself."
"Dear me!" said Hilda, drawing imperceptibly away from her companion.
"Is this the penalty of refinement? Pardon me; I do not believe it. It
is because you are a sculptor, that you think nothing can be finely
wrought except it be cold and hard, like the marble in which your ideas
take shape. I am a painter, and know that the most delicate beauty may be
softened and warmed throughout."
"I said a foolish thing, indeed," answered the sculptor. "It surprises me,
for I might have drawn a wiser knowledge out of my own experience. It is
the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early simplicity
to the worldliest of us."
Thus talking, they loitered slowly along beside the parapet which borders
the level summit of the Pincian with its irregular sweep. At intervals
they looked through the lattice-work of their thoughts at the varied
prospects that lay before and beneath them.
From the terrace where they now stood there is an abrupt descent towards
the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space they beheld
the tall palatial edifices, the church domes, and the ornamented gateway,
which grew and were consolidated out of the thought of Michael Angelo.
They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things, even in Rome,
which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold fountain at its
base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the empire, the far-off
republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a transient, visionary,
and impalpable character when we think that this indestructible monument
supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from
Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on beholding the cloudy pillar and the
fiery column, they whispered awestricken to one another, "In its shape it
is like that old obelisk which we and our fathers have so often seen on
the borders of the Nile." And now that very obelisk, with hardly a trace
of decay upon it, is the first thing that the modern traveller sees after
entering the Flaminian Gate!
Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw beyond
the invisible Tiber the Castle of St. Angelo; that immense tomb of a pagan
emperor, with the archangel at its summit.
Still farther off appeared a mighty pile of buildings, surmounted by the
vast dome, which all of us have shaped and swelled outward, like a huge
bubble, to the utmost Scope of our imaginations, long before we see it
floating over the worship of the city. It may be most worthily seen from
precisely the point where our two friends were now standing. At any
nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter's hides itself behind the immensity
of its separate parts,--so that we see only the front, only the sides,
only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and not the mighty
whole. But at this distance the entire outline of the world's cathedral,
as well as that of the palace of the world's chief priest, is taken in at
once. In such remoteness, moreover, the imagination is not debarred from
lending its assistance, even while we have the reality before our eyes,
and helping the weakness of human sense to do justice to so grand an
object. It requires both faith and fancy to enable us to feel, what is
nevertheless so true, that yonder, in front of the purple outline of hills,
is the grandest edifice ever built by man, painted against God's
loveliest sky.
After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in
Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances
fall into the piazza at their feet. They there beheld Miriam, who had
just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and
fountain. With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and
imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her thus
far, that it was now her desire to be left alone. The pertinacious model,
however, remained immovable.
And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the
interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be
mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it difficult
to believe his eyes. Miriam knelt down on the steps of the fountain; so
far there could be no question of the fact. To other observers, if any
there were, she probably appeared to take this attitude merely for the
convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush of water from the mouth
of one of the stone lions. But as she clasped her hands together after
thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the model, an idea took strong
possession of Kenyon's mind that Miriam was kneeling to this dark follower
there in the world's face!
"Do you see it?" he said to Hilda.
"See what?" asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone. "I see
Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water. I
often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that
used to be one of my playmates in my New England village."
"I fancied I saw something else," said Kenyon; "but it was doubtless a
mistake."
But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden
significance of Miriam's gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it suggest!
Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless vagrant
must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets of Rome,
fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of yore
following in an emperor's triumph. And was it conceivable that she would
have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great Kenyon dared
not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark adversary a vantage
ground?
"Hilda," said he abruptly, "who and what is Miriam? Pardon me; but are
you sure of her?"
"Sure of her!" repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend's sake.
"I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and faithful
friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well! What more than this
need I be sure of?"
"And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against
her?" continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda's
tone. "These are my own impressions, too. But she is such a mystery! We
do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an Englishwoman,
or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one would say, and
a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is not English
breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an artist, could
she hold a place in society without giving some clew to her past life."
"I love her dearly," said Hilda, still with displeasure in her tone, "and
trust her most entirely."
"My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do," replied Kenyon;
"and Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the
permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every
word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep. In these
particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native air;
and if we like to take generous views of our associates, we can do so, to
a reasonable extent, without ruining ourselves."
"The music has ceased," said Hilda; "I am going now."
There are three streets that, beginning close beside each other, diverge
from the Piazza del Popolo towards the heart of Rome: on the left, the Via
del Babuino; on the right, the Via della Ripetta; and between these two
that worldfamous avenue, the Corso. It appeared that Miriam and her
strange companion were passing up the first mentioned of these three, and
were soon hidden from Hilda and the sculptor.
The two latter left the Pincian by the broad and stately walk that skirts
along its brow. Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the
city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen roofs, above
which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside here and there
a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher situated palace,
looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a distance, ascending
out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the top of the
Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the Pantheon looking
heavenward with its ever-open eye.
Except these two objects, almost everything that they beheld was mediaeval,
though built, indeed, of the massive old stones and indestructible bricks
of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum, the Golden House, and
innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of Caesars and senators,
had supplied the material for all those gigantic hovels, and their walls
were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost, being made of precious
antique statues, burnt long ago for this petty purpose.
Rome, as it now exists, has grown up under the Popes, and seems like
nothing but a heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm between
our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up; and, for the better
part of two thousand years, its annals of obscure policies, and wars, and
continually recurring misfortunes, seem also but broken rubbish, as
compared with its classic history.
If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one of
old, it is only because we find it built over its grave. A depth of
thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it
lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no
survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those years
has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual sepulchre.
We know not how to characterize, in any accordant and compatible terms,
the Rome that lies before us; its sunless alleys, and streets of palaces;
its churches, lined with the gorgeous marbles that were originally
polished for the adornment of pagan temples; its thousands of evil smells,
mixed up with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as many censers;
its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what has long been dead.
Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the magnificence of a former
epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,--and nastiness at the foot of it.
As the sum of all, there are recollections that kindle the soul, and a
gloom and languor that depress it beyond any depth of melancholic
sentiment that can be elsewhere known.
Yet how is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome?
The city of ail time, and of all the world! The spot for which man's
great life and deeds have done so much, and for which decay has done
whatever glory and dominion could not do! At this moment, the evening
sunshine is flinging its golden mantle over it, making all that we thought
mean magnificent; the bells of all the churches suddenly ring out, as if
it were a peal of triumph because Rome is still imperial.
"I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always
made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything
else out of my heart."
"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated the sculptor. They had now reached the
grand stairs that ascend from the Piazza di Spagna to the hither brow of
the Pincian Hill. Old Beppo, the millionnaire of his ragged fraternity,
it is a wonder that no artist paints him as the cripple whom St. Peter
heals at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,--was just mounting his donkey
to depart, laden with the rich spoil of the day's beggary.
Up the stairs, drawing his tattered cloak about his face, came the model,
at whom Beppo looked askance, jealous of an encroacher on his rightful
domain. The figure passed away, however, up the Via Sistina. In the
piazza below, near the foot of the magnificent steps, stood Miriam, with
her eyes bent on the ground, as if she were counting those little, square,
uncomfortable paving-stones, that make it a penitential pilgrimage to walk
in Rome. She kept this attitude for several minutes, and when, at last,
the importunities of a beggar disturbed her from it, she seemed bewildered
and pressed her hand upon her brow.
"She has been in some sad dream or other, poor thing!" said Kenyon
sympathizingly; "and even now she is imprisoned there in a kind of cage,
the iron bars of which are made of her own thoughts."
"I fear she is not well," said Hilda. "I am going down the stairs, and
will join Miriam."
"Farewell, then," said the sculptor. "Dear Hilda, this is a perplexed and
troubled world! It soothes me inexpressibly to think of you in your tower,
with white doves and white thoughts for your companions, so high above us
all, and With the Virgin for your household friend. You know not how far
it throws its light, that lamp which you keep burning at her shrine! I
passed beneath the tower last night, and the ray cheered me, because you
lighted it."
"It has for me a religious significance," replied Hilda quietly, "and yet
I am no Catholic."
They parted, and Kenyon made haste along the Via Sistina, in the hope of
overtaking the model, whose haunts and character he was anxious to
investigate, for Miriam's sake. He fancied that he saw him a long way in
advance, but before he reached the Fountain of the Triton the dusky figure
had vanished.
CHAPTER XIII
A SCULPTOR'S STUDIO
About this period, Miriam seems to have been goaded by a weary
restlessness that drove her abroad on any errand or none. She went one
morning to visit Kenyon in his studio, whither he had invited her to see a
new statue, on which he had staked many hopes, and which was now almost
completed in the clay. Next to Hilda, the person for whom Miriam felt
most affection and confidence was Kenyon; and in all the difficulties that
beset her life, it was her impulse to draw near Hilda for feminine
sympathy, and the sculptor for brotherly counsel.
Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the voiceless
gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge of that dark
chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand of theirs;
she might strive to call out, "Help, friends! help!" but, as with
dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in the
remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an infinite,
shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings
to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist,
is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or
peculiarity of character, that puts an individual ajar with the world.
Very often, as in Miriam's case, there is an insatiable instinct that
demands friendship, love, and intimate communion, but is forced to pine in
empty forms; a hunger of the heart, which finds only shadows to feed upon.
Kenyon's studio was in a cross-street, or, rather, an ugly and dirty
little lane, between the Corso and the Via della Ripetta; and though chill,
narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures, the lane
was not a whit more disagreeable than nine tenths of the Roman streets.
Over the door of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing an
inscription, to the purport that the sculpture-rooms within had formerly
been occupied by the illustrious artist Canova. In these precincts (which
Canova's genius was not quite of a character to render sacred, though it
certainly made them interesting) the young American sculptor had now
established himself.
The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking place,
with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stone-mason's workshop. Bare
floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls,--an old chair or two, or
perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the possibility of
ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily scrawled sketches of
nude figures on the whitewash of the wall. These last are probably the
sculptor's earliest glimpses of ideas that may hereafter be solidified
into imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain as impalpable as a dream.
Next there are a few very roughly modelled little figures in clay or
plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the idea as it advances towards a
marble immortality; and then is seen the exquisitely designed shape of
clay, more interesting than even the final marble, as being the intimate
production of the sculptor himself, moulded throughout with his loving
hands, and nearest to his imagination and heart. In the plaster-cast,
from this clay model, the beauty of the statue strangely disappears, to
shine forth again with pure white radiance, in the precious marble of
Carrara. Works in all these stages of advancement, and some with the
final touch upon them, might be found in Kenyon's studio.
Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble,
with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in these
days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men whose
merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by
the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of Praxiteles; or,
very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of illusive representation
can be effected in marble, they are capable of achieving, if the object be
before their eyes. The sculptor has but to present these men with a
plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient block of marble, and tell
them that the figure is imbedded in the stone, and must be freed from its
encumbering superfluities; and, in due time, without the necessity of his
touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him the statue
that is to make him renowned. His creative power has wrought it with a
word.
In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments, and
so happily relieve itself of the drudgery, of actual performance; doing
wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may be
suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor's own. And how
much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons and
buttonholes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths,--and these, at our present
epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown,--would be abated, if we
were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit for such pretty
performances, as immortalized in marble! They are not his work, but that
of some nameless machine in human shape.
Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished
bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone; and,
as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the glow of
feeling and intelligence. As the skilful workman gave stroke after stroke
of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect, it was
impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an extraneous
environment; the human countenance within its embrace must have existed
there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first made. Another
bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon's most trustworthy
assistants was at work, giving delicate touches, shaving off an impalpable
something, and leaving little heaps of marble dust to attest it.
"As these busts in the block of marble," thought Miriam, "so does our
individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve it
out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action."
Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he
threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his
visitor. He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top of
his head; a costume which became him better than tho formal garments which
he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains. The sculptor had a
face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a worthy
subject for as good an artist as himself: features finely cut, as if
already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much
hidden in a lightbrown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.
"I will not offer you my hand," said he; "it is grimy with Cleopatra's
clay."
"No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human," answered Miriam. "I
have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among your marbles.
My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of agitation, for me
to work at it whole days together, without intervals of repose. So, what
have you to show me?"
"Pray look at everything here," said Kenyon. "I love to have painters see
my work. Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that of
the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on mine.
More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never judge me
fairly,--nor I them, perhaps."
To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or plaster,
of which there were several in the room, comprising originals or casts of
most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced. He was still too
young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things. What he had to
show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in various directions, of
a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to himself, and profiting more
by his failures than by any successes of which he was yet capable. Some
of them, however, had great merit; and in the pure, fine glow of the new
marble, it may be, they dazzled the judgment into awarding them higher
praise than they deserved. Miriam admired the statue of a beautiful youth,
a pearlfisher; who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the
sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the
seaweeds, all of like value to him now.
"The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,"
remarked she. "But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we
cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well.
I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral lesson;
and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose."
In another style, there was a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from
any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all
known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied, and solved
in the artist's mind. The bust over the tomb in Grey Friars Church, the
original miniatures and pictures, wherever to be found, had mingled each
its special truth in this one work; wherein, likewise, by long perusal and
deep love of the Paradise Lost, the Comus, the Lycidas, and L'Allegro, the
sculptor had succeeded, even better than he knew, in spiritualizing his
marble with the poet's mighty genius. And this was a great thing to have
achieved, such a length of time after the dry bones and dust of Milton
were like those of any other dead man.
There were also several portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three
of the illustrious men of our own country, whom Kenyon, before he left
America, had asked permission to model. He had done so, because he
sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or bronze,
the one would corrode and the other crumble in the long lapse of time,
beneath these great men's immortality. Possibly, however, the young
artist may have underestimated the durability of his material. Other
faces there were, too, of men who (if the brevity of their remembrance,
after death, can be augured from their little value in life) should have
been represented in snow rather than marble. Posterity will be puzzled
what to do with busts like these, the concretions and petrifactions of a
vain selfestimate; but will find, no doubt, that they serve to build into
stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if the marble had never
been blocked into the guise of human heads.
But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost
indestructibility, of a marble bust! Whether in our own case, or that of
other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during which
our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human being. It is
especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
themselves in this mode. The brief duration of our families, as a
hereditary household, renders it next to a certainty that the
great-grandchildren will not know their father's grandfather, and that
half a century hence at furthest, the hammer of the auctioneer will thump
its knock-down blow against his blockhead, sold at so much for the pound
of stone! And it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving our
features to be a dusty-white ghost among strangers of another generation,
who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers (as we have seen
men do by Caesar's), and infallibly break it off if they can do so without
detection!
"Yes," said Miriam, who had been revolving some such thoughts as the above,
"it is a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to leave
no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly and
speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with marble.
Methinks, too, it will be a fresher and better world, when it flings off
this great burden of stony memories, which the ages have deemed it a piety
to heap upon its back."
"What you say," remarked Kenyon, "goes against my whole art. Sculpture,
and the delight which men naturally take in it, appear to me a proof that
it is good to work with all time before our view."
"Well, well," answered Miriam, "I must not quarrel with you for flinging
your heavy stones at poor Posterity; and, to say the truth, I think you
are as likely to hit the mark as anybody. These busts, now, much as I
seem to scorn them, make me feel as if you were a magician.. You turn
feverish men into cool, quiet marble. What a blessed change for them!
Would you could do as much for me!"
"O, gladly!" cried Kenyon, who had long wished to model that beautiful
and most expressive face. "When will you begin to sit?"
"Poh! that was not what I meant," said Miriam. "Come, show me something
else."
"Do you recognize this?" asked the sculptor.
He took out of his desk a little old-fashioned ivory coffer, yellow with
age; it was richly carved with antique figures and foliage; and had Kenyon
thought fit to say that Benvenuto Cellini wrought this precious box, the
skill and elaborate fancy of the work would by no means have discredited
his word, nor the old artist's fame. At least, it was evidently a
production of Benvenuto's school and century, and might once have been the
jewel-case of some grand lady at the court of the De' Medici.
Lifting the lid, however, no blaze of diamonds was disclosed, but only,
lapped in fleecy cotton, a small, beautifully shaped hand, most delicately
sculptured in marble. Such loving care and nicest art had been lavished
here, that the palm really seemed to have a tenderness in its very
substance. Touching those lovely fingers,--had the jealous sculptor
allowed you to touch,--you could hardly believe that a virgin warmth would
not steal from them into your heart.
"Ah, this is very beautiful!" exclaimed Miriam, with a genial smile. "It
is as good in its way as Loulie's hand with its baby-dimples, which Powers
showed me at Florence, evidently valuing it as much as if he had wrought
it out of a piece of his great heart. As good as Harriet Hosmer's clasped
hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the individuality and heroic
union of two high, poetic lives! Nay, I do not question that it is better
than either of those, because you must have wrought it passionately, in
spite of its maiden palm and dainty fingertips."
"Then you do recognize it?" asked Kenyon.
"There is but one right hand on earth that could have supplied the model,"
answered Miriam; "so small and slender, so perfectly symmetrical, and yet
with a character of delicate energy. I have watched it a hundred times at
its work; but I did not dream that you had won Hilda so far! How have you
persuaded that shy maiden to let you take her hand in marble?"
"Never! She never knew it!" hastily replied Kenyon, anxious to vindicate
his mistress's maidenly reserve. "I stole it from her. The hand is a
reminiscence. After gazing at it so often, and even holding it once for
an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me, I should be a bungler
indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like the life."
"May you win the original one day!" said Miriam kindly.
"I have little ground to hope it," answered the sculptor despondingly;
"Hilda does not dwell in our mortal atmosphere; and gentle and soft as she
appears, it will be as difficult to win her heart as to entice down a
white bird from its sunny freedom in the sky. It is strange, with all her
delicacy and fragility, the impression she makes of being utterly
sufficient to herself. No; I shall never win her. She is abundantly
capable of sympathy, and delights to receive it, but she has no need of
love."
"I partly agree with you," said Miriam. "It is a mistaken idea, which men
generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to throw
their whole being into what is technically called love. We have, to say
the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have nothing
else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects in life, they
are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women distinguished in
art, literature, and science,--and multitudes whose hearts and minds find
good employment in less ostentatious ways,--who lead high, lonely lives,
and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as your sex is concerned."
"And Hilda will be one of these!" said Kenyon sadly; "the thought makes
me shiver for myself, and and for her, too."
"Well," said Miriam, smiling, "perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist
which you have sculptured to such perfection. In that case you may hope.
These old masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender hand
and woman's heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals."
The sculptor sighed as he put away the treasure of Hilda's marble hand
into the ivory coffer, and thought how slight was the possibility that he
should ever feel responsive to his own the tender clasp of the original.
He dared not even kiss the image that he himself had made: it had assumed
its share of Hilda's remote and shy divinity.
"And now," said Miriam, "show me the new statue which you asked me hither
to see."
CHAPTER XIV
CLEOPATRA
My new statue!" said Kenyon, who had positively forgotten it in the
thought of Hilda; "here it is, under this veil." "Not a nude figure, I
hope," observed Miriam. "Every young sculptor seems to think that he must
give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve,
Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent
clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things.
Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is
practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as
you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if
only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models.
The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old
Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among
pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as
modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as
for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice),
and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they
have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of
quicklime in their stead."
"You are severe upon the professors of my art," said Kenyon, half smiling,
half seriously; "not that you are wholly wrong, either. We are bound to
accept drapery of some kind, and make the best of it. But what are we to
do? Must we adopt the costume of to-day, and carve, for example, a Venus
in a hoop-petticoat?"
"That would be a boulder, indeed!" rejoined Miriam, laughing. "But the
difficulty goes to confirm me in my belief that, except for portrait-busts,
sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among living arts. It
has wrought itself out, and come fairly to an end. There is never a new
group nowadays; never even so much as a new attitude. Greenough (I take
my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new; nor Crawford either,
except in the tailoring line. There are not, as you will own, more than
half a dozen positively original statues or groups in the world, and these
few are of immemorial antiquity. A person familiar with the Vatican, the
Uffizzi Gallery, the Naples Gallery, and the Louvre, will at once refer
any modern production to its antique prototype; which, moreover, had begun
to get out of fashion, even in old Roman days."
"Pray stop, Miriam," cried Kenyon, "or I shall fling away the chisel
forever!"
"Fairly own to me, then, my friend," rejoined Miriam, whose disturbed mind
found a certain relief in this declamation, "that you sculptors are, of
necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world."
"I do not own it," said Kenyon, "yet cannot utterly contradict you, as
regards the actual state of the art. But as long as the Carrara quarries
still yield pure blocks, and while my own country has marble mountains,
probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future
sculptors will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the
world with new shapes of delicate grace and massive grandeur. Perhaps,"
he added, smiling, "mankind will consent to wear a more manageable costume;
or, at worst, we sculptors shall get the skill to make broadcloth
transparent, and render a majestic human character visible through the
coats and trousers of the present day."
"Be it so!" said Miriam; "you are past my counsel. Show me the veiled
figure, which, I am afraid, I have criticised beforehand. To make amends,
I am in the mood to praise it now."
But, as Kenyon was about to take the cloth off the clay model, she laid
her hand on his arm.
"Tell me first what is the subject," said she, "for I have sometimes
incurred great displeasure from members of your brotherhood by being too
obtuse to puzzle out the purport of their productions. It is so difficult,
you know, to compress and define a character or story, and make it patent
at a glance, within the narrow scope attainable by sculpture! Indeed, I
fancy it is still the ordinary habit with sculptors, first to finish their
group of statuary,--in such development as the particular block of marble
will allow,--and then to choose the subject; as John of Bologna did with
his Rape of the Sabines. Have you followed that good example?"
"No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra," replied Kenyon, a little
disturbed by Miriam's raillery. "The special epoch of her history you
must make out for yourself."
He drew away the cloth that had served to keep the moisture of the clay
model from being exhaled. The sitting figure of a woman was seen. She
was draped from head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously
studied from that of ancient Egypt, as revealed by the strange sculpture
of that country, its coins, drawings, painted mummy-cases, and whatever
other tokens have been dug out of its pyramids, graves, and catacombs.
Even the stiff Egyptian head-dress was adhered to, but had been softened
into a rich feminine adornment, without losing a particle of its truth.
Difficulties that might well have seemed insurmountable had been
courageously encountered and made flexible to purposes of grace and
dignity; so that Cleopatra sat attired in a garb proper to her historic
and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as the
beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the
magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold eyes of
Octavius.
A marvellous repose--that rare merit in statuary, except it be the lumpish
repose native to the block of stone--was diffused throughout the figure.
The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and
turmoil of her life, and for one instant--as it were, between two pulse
throbs--had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout every
vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for Octavius had
seen her, and remained insensible to her enchantments. But still there
was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's heart. The
repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or
foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy and fierceness,
she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that
you were now drawing midway in your throat.
The face was a miraculous success. The sculptor had not shunned to give
the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian
physiognomy. His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded; for
Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen the
tame Grecian type. The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
revolving thought; a glance into her past life and present emergencies,
while her spirit gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was getting
sternly reconciled to impending doom. In one view, there was a certain
softness and tenderness,--how breathed into the statue, among so many
strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say. Catching another
glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone and cruel as fire.
In a word, all Cleopatra--fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked,
terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment--was kneaded
into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet clay from the
Tiber. Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material, she would be
one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in them which does
not cool down, throughout the centuries?
"What a woman is this!" exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause. "Tell me,
did she ever try, even while you were creating her, to overcome you with
her fury or her love? Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more
and more towards hot life beneath your hand? My dear friend, it is a great
work! How have you learned to do it?"
"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of
brain and hand," said Kenyon, not without a perception that his work was
good; "but I know not how it came about at last. I kindled a great fire
within my mind, and threw in the material,--as Aaron threw the gold of the
Israelites into the furnace,--and in the midmost heat uprose Cleopatra, as
you see her."
"What I most marvel at," said Miriam, "is the womanhood that you have so
thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements. Where
did you get that secret? You never found it in your gentle Hilda, yet I
recognize its truth."
"No, surely, it was not in Hilda," said Kenyon. "Her womanhood is of the
ethereal type, and incompatible with any shadow of darkness or evil."
"You are right," rejoined Miriam; "there are women of that ethereal type,
as you term it, and Hilda is one of them. She would die of her first
wrong-doing,--supposing for a moment that she could be capable of doing
wrong. Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great burden;
of sin, not a feather's weight. Methinks now, were it my doom, I could
bear either, or both at once; but my conscience is still as white as
Hilda's. Do you question it?"
"Heaven forbid, Miriam!" exclaimed the sculptor.
He was startled at the strange turn which she had so suddenly given to the
conversation. Her voice, too,--so much emotion was stifled rather than
expressed in it, sounded unnatrural.
"O, my friend," cried she, with sudden passion, "will you be my friend
indeed? I am lonely, lonely, lonely! There is a secret in my heart that
burns me,--that tortures me! Sometimes I fear to go mad of it; sometimes I
hope to die of it; but neither of the two happens. Ah, if I could but
whisper it to only one human soul! And you--you see far into womanhood;
you receive it widely into your large view. Perhaps--perhaps, but Heaven
only knows, you might understand me! O, let me speak!"
"Miriam, dear friend," replied the sculptor, "if I can help you, speak
freely, as to a brother."
"Help me? No!" said Miriam.
Kenyon's response had been perfectly frank and kind; and yet the subtlety
of Miriam's emotion detected a certain reserve and alarm in his warmly
expressed readiness to hear her story. In his secret soul, to say the
truth, the sculptor doubted whether it were well for this poor, suffering
girl to speak what she so yearned to say, or for him to listen. If there
were any active duty of friendship to be performed, then, indeed, he would
joyfully have come forward to do his best. But if it were only a pent-up
heart that sought an outlet? in that case it was by no means so certain
that a confession would do good. The more her secret struggled and fought
to be told, the more certain would it be to change all former relations
that had subsisted between herself and the friend to whom she might reveal
it. Unless he could give her all the sympathy, and just the kind of
sympathy that the occasion required, Miriam would hate him by and by, and
herself still more, if he let her speak.
This was what Kenyon said to himself; but his reluctance, after all, and
whether he were conscious of it or no, resulted from a suspicion that had
crept into his heart and lay there in a dark corner. Obscure as it was,
when Miriam looked into his eyes, she detected it at once.
"Ah, I shall hate you!" cried she, echoing the thought which he had not
spoken; she was half choked with the gush of passion that was thus turned
back upon her. "You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble."
"No; but full of sympathy, God knows!" replied he.
In truth, his suspicions, however warranted by the mystery in which Miriam
was enveloped, had vanished in the earnestness of his kindly and sorrowful
emotion. He was now ready to receive her trust.
"Keep your sympathy, then, for sorrows that admit of such solace," said
she, making a strong effort to compose herself. "As for my griefs, I know
how to manage them. It was all a mistake: you can do nothing for me,
unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra there;
and I am not of her sisterhood, I do. assure you. Forget this foolish
scene, my friend, and never let me see a reference to it in your eyes when
they meet mine hereafter."
"Since you desire it, all shall be forgotten," answered the sculptor,
pressing her hand as she departed; "or, if ever I can serve you, let my
readiness to do so be remembered. Meanwhile, dear Miriam, let us meet in
the same clear, friendly light as heretofore."
"You are less sincere than I thought you," said Miriam, "if you try to
make me think that there will be no change."
As he attended her through the antechamber, she pointed to the statue of
the pearl-diver.
"My secret is not a pearl," said she; "yet a man might drown himself in
plunging after it."
After Kenyon had closed the door, she went wearily down the staircase, but
paused midway, as if debating with herself whether to return.
"The mischief was done," thought she; "and I might as well have had the
solace that ought to come with it. I have lost,--by staggering a little
way beyond the mark, in the blindness of my distress, I have lost, as we
shall hereafter find, the genuine friendship of this clear-minded,
honorable, true-hearted young man, and all for nothing. What if I should
go back this moment and compel him to listen?"
She ascended two or three of the stairs, but again paused, murmured to
herself, and shook her head.
"No, no, no," she thought; "and I wonder how I ever came to dream of it.
Unless I had his heart for my own,--and that is Hilda's, nor would I steal
it from her,--it should never be the treasure Place of my secret. It is
no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red carbuncle--red
as blood--is too rich a gem to put into a stranger's casket."
She went down the stairs, and found her shadow waiting for her in the
street.
CHAPTER XV
AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
On the evening after Miriam's visit to Kenyon's studio, there was an
assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent that,
like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he could
gain admittance.
The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more
formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among the
foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable ones,
as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.
If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who cannot
find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and pursuits
all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world's stock of
beautiful productions.
One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so loath
to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is, doubtless,
that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous enough to
create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are isolated
strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.
Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the pencil.
On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the jealousies
and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung aside, still
irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of imaginative men.
It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should be the fact. The
public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor's or the painter's prospects
of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to which literary men
make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited body of wealthy
patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but blind judges in
matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception. Thus, success in
art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and it is almost
inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at his gifted
brother's fame, and be chary of the good word that might help him to sell
still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter heap generous
praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor never has a
favorable eye for any marble but his own.
Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity.
They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such
brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.
The company this evening included several men and women whom the world has
heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to know. It
would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages, name by name,
and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown each
well-deserving brow according to its deserts. The opportunity is tempting,
but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in respect to those
individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far greater number that
must needs be left in the shade. Ink, moreover, is apt to have a
corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister, instead of any
more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as those of artists. We
must therefore forego the delight of illuminating this chapter with
personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on canvas, or gleams
in the white moonlight of marble.
OtherWise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with such
tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to reproduce
her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth, and yet are but
the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the painter's insight
and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic, the moon throws her
light far out of the picture, and the crimson of the summer night
absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might indicate a
poetpainter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and whose canvas is
peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to the ethereal life,
because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood. Or we might bow
before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too religiously, with too
earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for the world at once to
recognize how much toil and thought are compressed into the stately brow
of Prospero, and Miranda's maiden loveliness; or from what a depth within
this painter's heart the Angel is leading forth St. Peter.
Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none of
them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not aimed.
It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much better
represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque department.
Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the public than the
men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density and solid
substance of the material in which they work, and the sort of physical
advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive unreality of
color. To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself; whereas a painter
is nothing, unless individually eminent.
One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy, and
possessing at his fingers' ends the capability of doing beautiful things.
He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and bright,
under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as he might
have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty years, in
making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other marble progeny
of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory exhalation out of
the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull window-panes of to-day.
Gifted with a more delicate power than any other man alive, he had
foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted himself into a Pagan
idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our present world, it would be
exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving and reverencing the pure
material in which he wrought, as surely this admirable sculptor did, he
had nevertheless robbed the marble of its chastity, by giving it an
artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin and shame to look at his
nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves to his imagination, no doubt,
with all their deity about them; but, bedaubed with buff color, they
stood forth to the eyes of the profane in the guise of naked women. But,
whatever criticism may be ventured on his style, it was good to meet a man
so modest and yet imbued with such thorough and simple conviction of his
own right principles and practice, and so quietly satisfied that his kind
of antique achievement was all that sculpture could effect for modern life.
This eminent person's weight and authority among his artistic brethren
were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on a topic
of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger sculptors.
They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the purposes of
original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with gentle calmness, as
if there could possibly be no other side, and often ratifying, as it were,
his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic "Yes."
The veteran Sculptor's unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted public
a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the nice carving
of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and other such
graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical men they
doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still not
precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A sculptor,
indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon him, should
be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in measured verse
and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves him in the stead of
shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white, undecaying substance.
It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in it, and therefore makes
it a religious obligation to commit no idea to its mighty guardianship,
save such as may repay the marble for its faithful care, its incorruptible
fidelity, by warming it with an ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble
assumes a sacred character; and no man should dare to touch it unless he
feels within himself a certain consecration and a priesthood, the only
evidence of which, for the public eye, will he the high treatment of
heroic subjects, or the delicate evolution of spiritual, through material
beauty.
No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them probably,
troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever sculptors. Marble,
in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute to it. It was merely a
sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into convenient blocks, and
worth, in that state, about two or three dollars per pound; and it was
susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes (by their own mechanical
ingenuity, or that of artisans in their employment) which would enable
them to sell it again at a much higher figure. Such men, on the strength
of some small knack in handling clay, which might have been fitly employed
in making wax-work, are bold to call themselves sculptors. How terrible
should be the thought that the nude woman whom the modern artist patches
together, bit by bit, from a dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing
by her, shall last as long as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group
of--no matter what, since it has no moral or intellectual existence will
not physically crumble any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!
Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet in
ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid compass
of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed faithfully out,
would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a tendency thitherward,
even if they lingered to gather up golden dross by the wayside. Their
actual business (though they talked about it very much as other men talk
of cotton, politics, flour barrels, and sugar) necessarily illuminated
their conversation with something akin to the ideal. So, when the guests
collected themselves in little groups, here and there, in the wide saloon,
a cheerful and airy gossip began to be heard. The atmosphere ceased to be
precisely that of common life; a hint, mellow tinge, such as we see in
pictures, mingled itself with the lamplight.
This good effect was assisted by many curious little treasures of art,
which the host had taken care to strew upon his tables. They were
principally such bits of antiquity as the soil of Rome and its
neighborhood are still rich in; seals, gems, small figures of bronze,
mediaeval carvings in ivory; things which had been obtained at little cost,
yet might have borne no inconsiderable value in the museum of a virtuoso.
As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old
drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore evidence
on their faces of the touch of master-hands. Very ragged and ill
conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with rough
usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched rudely
with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or a pencil,
were now half rubbed out. You would not anywhere see rougher and homelier
things than these. But this hasty rudeness made the sketches only the
more valuable; because the artist seemed to have bestirred himself at the
pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever material was nearest, so as to
seize the first glimpse of an idea that might vanish in the twinkling of
an eye. Thus, by the spell of a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of
paper, you were enabled to steal close to an old master, and watch him in
the very effervescence of his genius.
According to the judgment of several con-, noisseurs, Raphael's own hand
had communidated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if genuine,
it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna, now hanging
in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence. Another drawing
was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be a somewhat varied
design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the Sciarra Palace.
There were at least half a dozen others, to which the owner assigned as
high an origin. It was delightful to believe in their authenticity, at
all events; for these things make the spectator more vividly sensible of a
great painter's power, than the final glow and perfected art of the most
consummate picture that may have been elaborated from them. There is an
effluence of divinity in the first sketch; and there, if anywhere, you
find the pure light of inspiration, which the subsequent toil of the
artist serves to bring out in stronger lustre, indeed, but likewise
adulterates it with what belongs to an inferior mood. The aroma and
fragrance of new thoughts were perceptible in these designs, after three
centuries of wear and tear. The charm lay partly in their very
imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets the imagination at work;
whereas, the finished picture, if a good one, leaves the spectator nothing
to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him.
Hilda was greatly interested in this rich portfolio. She lingered so long
over one particular sketch, that Miriam asked her what discovery she had
made.
"Look at it carefully," replied Hilda, putting the sketch into her hands.
"If you take pains to disentangle the design from those pencil~ marks that
seem to have been scrawled over it, I think you will see something very
curious."
"It is a hopeless affair, I am afraid," said Miriam. "I have neither your
faith, dear Hilda, nor your perceptive faculty. Fie! what a blurred
scrawl it is indeed!"
The drawing had originally been very slight, and had suffered more from
time and hard usage than almost any other in the collection; it appeared,
too, that there had been an attempt (perhaps by the very hand that drew
it) to obliterate the design. By Hilda's help, however, Miriam pretty
distinctly made out a winged figure with a drawn sword, and a dragon, or a
demon, prostrate at his feet.
"I am convinced," said Hilda in a low, reverential tone," that Guido's own
touches are on that ancient scrap of paper! If so, it must be his
original sketch for the picture of the Archangel Michael setting his foot
upon the demon, in the Church of the Cappuccini. The composition and
general arrangement of the sketch are the same with those of the picture;
the only difference being, that the demon has a more upturned face, and
scowls vindictively at the Archangel, who turns away his eyes in painful
disgust."
"No wonder!" responded Miriam. "The expression suits the daintiness of
Michael's character, as Guido represents him. He never could have looked
the demon in the face!"
"Miriam!" exclaimed her friend reproachfully, "you grieve me, and you
know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew."
"Forgive me, Hilda!" said Miriam. "You take these matters more
religiously than I can, for my life. Guido's Archangel is a fine picture,
of course, but it never impressed me as it does yOU."
"Well; we will not talk of that," answered Hilda. "What I wanted you to
notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon. It is entirely unlike
the demon of the finished picture. Guido, you know, always affirmed that
the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary. Now,
here is the face as he first conceived it."
"And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished picture,"
said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. "What a spirit is
conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming dragon,
under the Archangel's foot! Neither is the face an impossible one. Upon
my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a living man!"
"And so have I," said Hilda. "It was what struck me from the first."
"Donatello, look at this face!" cried Kenyon.
The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters of
art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them. After
holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him with
a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
bitterness of hatred.
"I know the face well!" whispered he. "It is Miriam's model!"
It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam's attendant, to think
of him as personating the demon's part in a picture of more than two
centuries ago. Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin and
misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this face?
Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old master, as
Miriam was haunted now? Did the ominous shadow follow him through all the
sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that gathered about its
close? And when Guido died, did the spectre betake himself to those
ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till it was Miriam's
ill-hap to encounter him?
"I do not acknowledge the resemblance at all," said Miriam, looking
narrowly at the sketch; "and, as I have drawn the face twenty times, I
think you will own that I am the best judge."
A discussion here arose, in reference to Guido's Archangel, and it was
agreed that these four friends should visit the Church of the Cappuccini
the next morning, and critically examine the picture in question; the
similarity between it and the sketch being, at all events, a very curious
circumstance.
It was now a little past ten o'clock, when some of the company, who had
been standing in a balcony, declared the moonlight to be resplendent.
They proposed a ramble through the streets, taking in their way some of
those scenes of ruin which produced their best effects under the splendor
of the Italian moon.
CHAPTER XVI
A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
The proposal for a moonlight ramble was received with acclamation by all
the younger portion of the company. They immediately set forth and
descended from story to story, dimly lighting their way by waxen tapers,
which are a necessary equipment to those whose thoroughfare, in the
night-time, lies up and down a Roman staircase. Emerging from the
courtyard of the edifice, they looked upward and saw the sky full of light,
which seemed to have a delicate purple or crimson lustre, or, at least
some richer tinge than the cold, white moonshine of other skies. It
gleamed over the front of the opposite palace, showing the architectural
ornaments of its cornice and pillared portal, as well as the ironbarred
basement windows, that gave such a prison-like aspect to the structure,
and the shabbiness and Squalor that lay along its base. A cobbler was
just shutting up his little shop, in the basement of the palace; a cigar
vender's lantern flared in the blast that came through the archway; a
French sentinel paced to and fro before the portal; a homeless dog, that
haunted thereabouts, barked as obstreperously at the party as if he were
the domestic guardian of the precincts.
The air was quietly full of the noise of falling water, the cause of which
was nowhere visible, though apparently near at hand. This pleasant,
natural sound, not unlike that of a distant cascade in the forest, may be
heard in many of the Roman streets and piazzas, when the tumult of the
city is hushed; for consuls, emperors, and popes, the great men of every
age, have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the
shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging, upgush and downfall of
water. They have written their names in that unstable.element, and proved
it a more durable record than brass or marble.
"Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for your
companion," said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at her side. "I
am not now in a merry mood, as when we set all the world a-dancing the
other afternoon, in the Borghese grounds."
"I never wish to dance any more," answered Donatello.
"What a melancholy was in that tone!" exclaimed Miriam. "You are getting
spoilt in this dreary Rome, and will be as wise and as wretched as all the
rest of mankind, unless you go back soon to your Tuscan vineyards. Well;
give me your arm, then! But take care that no friskiness comes over you.
We must walk evenly and heavily to-night!"
The party arranged itself according to its natural affinities or casual
likings; a sculptor generally choosing a painter, and a painter a
sculp--tor, for his companion, in preference to brethren of their own art.
Kenyon would gladly have taken Hilda to himself, and have drawn her a
little aside from the throng of merry wayfarers. But she kept near
Miriam, and seemed, in her gentle and quiet way, to decline a separate
alliance either with him or any other of her acquaintances.
So they set forth, and had gone but a little way, when the narrow street
emerged into a piazza, on one side of which, glistening and dimpling in
the moonlight, was the most famous fountain in Rome. Its murmur--not to
say its uproar--had been in the ears of the company, ever since they came
into the open air. It was the Fountain of Trevi, which draws its
precious water from a source far beyond the walls, whence it flows
hitherward through old subterranean aqueducts, and sparkles forth as pure
as the virgin who first led Agrippa to its well-spring, by her father's
door.
"I shall sip as much of this water as the hollow of my hand will hold,"
said Miriam.
"I am leaving Rome in a few days; and the tradition goes, that a parting
draught at the Fountain of Trevi insures the traveller's return, whatever
obstacles and improbabilities may seem to beset him. Will you drink,
Donatello?"
"Signorina, what you drink, I drink," said the youth.
They and the rest of the party descended some steps to the water's brim,
and, after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the fountain,
where some sculptor of Bernini's school had gone absolutely mad in marble.
It was a great palace front, with niches and many bas-reliefs, out of
which looked Agrippa's legendary virgin, and several of the allegoric
sisterhood; while, at the base, appeared Neptune, with his floundering
steeds, and Tritons blowing their horns about him, and twenty other
artificial fantasies, which the calm moonlight soothed into better taste
than was native to them.
And, after all, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever human skill
contrived. At the foot of the palatial facade was strewn, with careful
art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive rock,
looking is if it might have lain there since the deluge. Over a central
precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from a hundred
crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams spouted out of
the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops;
while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping from one rude step
to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with sedge,
because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain
of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her own. Finally, the water,
tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with joyous haste and never-ceasing
murmur, poured itself into a great marble-brimmed reservoir, and filled it
with a quivering tide; on which was seen, continually, a snowy semicircle
of momentary foam from the principal cascade, as well as a multitude of
snow points from smaller jets. The basin occupied the whole breadth of
the piazza, whence flights of steps descended to its border. A boat
might float, and make voyages from one shore to another in this mimic lake.
In the daytime, there is hardly a livelier scene in Rome than the
neighborhood of the Fountain of Trevi; for the piazza is then filled with
the stalls of vegetable and fruit dealers, chestnut roasters, cigar
venders, and other people, whose petty and wandering traffic is transacted
in the open air. It is likewise thronged with idlers, lounging over the
iron railing, and with Forestieri, who came hither to see the famous
fountain. Here, also, are seen men with buckets, urchins with cans, and
maidens (a picture as old as the patriarchal times) bearing their pitchers
upon their heads. For the water of Trevi is in request, far and wide, as
the most refreshing draught for feverish lips, the pleasantest to mingle
with wine, and the wholesomest to drink, in its native purity, that can
anywhere be found. But now, at early midnight, the piazza was a solitude;
and it was a delight to behold this untamable water, sporting by itself in
the moonshine, and compelling all the elaborate trivialities of art to
assume a natural aspect, in accordance with its own powerful simplicity.
"What would be done with this water power," suggested an artist, "if we
had it in one of our American cities? Would they employ it to turn the
machinery of a cotton mill, I wonder?"
"The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities," said
Kenyon, "and, possibly, they would give me a commission to carve the
one-and-thirty (is that the number?) sister States, each pouring a silver
stream from a separate can into one vast basin, which should represent the
grand reservoir of national prosperity."
"Or, if they wanted a bit of satire," remarked an English artist, "you
could set those same one-and-thirty States to cleansing the national flag
of any stains that it may have incurred. The Roman washerwomen at the
lavatory yonder, plying their labor in the open air, would serve admirably
as models."
"I have often intended to visit this fountain by moonlight,", said Miriam,
"because it was here that the interview took place between Corinne and
Lord Neville, after their separation and temporary estrangement. Pray
come behind me, one of you, and let me try whether the face can be
recognized in the water."
Leaning over the stone brim of the basin, she heard footsteps stealing
behind her, and knew that somebody was looking over her shoulder. The
moonshine fell directly behind Miriam, illuminating the palace front and
the whole scene of statues and rocks, and filling the basin, as it were,
with tremulous and palpable light. Corinne, it will be remembered, knew
Lord Neville by the reflection of his face in the water. In Miriam's case,
however (owing to the agitation of the water, its transparency, and the
angle at which she was compelled to lean over), no reflected image
appeared; nor, from the same causes, would it have been possible for the
recognition between Corinne and her lover to take place. The moon, indeed,
flung Miriam's shadow at the bottom of the basin, as well as two more
shadows of persons who had followed her, on either side,
"Three shadows!" exclaimed Miriam--"three separate shadows, all so black
and heavy that they sink in the water! There they lie on the bottom, as
if all three were drowned together. This shadow on my right is Donatello;
I know him by his curls, and the turn of his head. My left-hand
companion puzzles me; a shapeless mass, as indistinct as the premonition
of calamity! Which of you can it be? Ah!"
She had turned round, while speaking, and saw beside her the strange
creature whose attendance on her was already familiar, as a marvel and a
jest; to the whole company of artists. A general burst of laughter
followed the recognition; while the model leaned towards Miriam, as she
shrank from him, and muttered something that was inaudible to those who
witnessed the scene. By his gestures, however, they concluded that he was
inviting her to bathe her hands.
"He cannot be an Italian; at least not a Roman," observed an artist. "I
never knew one of them to care about ablution. See him now! It is as if
he were trying to wash off' the time-stains and earthly soil of a thousand
years!"
Dipping his hands into the capacious washbowl before him, the model rubbed
them together with the utmost vehemence. Ever and anon, too, he peeped
into the water, as if expecting to see the whole Fountain of Trevi turbid
with the results of his ablution. Miriam looked at him, some little time,
with an aspect of real terror, and even imitated him by leaning over to
peep into the basin. Recovering herself, she took up some of the water in
the hollow of her hand, and practised an old form of exorcism by flinging
it in her persecutor's face.
"In the name of all the Saints," cried she, "vanish, Demon, and let me be
free of you now and forever!"
"It will not suffice," said some of the mirthful party, "unless the
Fountain of Trevi gushes with holy water."
In fact, the exorcism was quite ineffectual upon the pertinacious demon,
or whatever the apparition might be. Still he washed his brown, bony
talons; still he peered into the vast basin, as if all the water of that
great drinking-cup of Rome must needs be stained black or sanguine; and
still he gesticulated to Miriam to follow his example. The spectators
laughed loudly, but yet with a kind of constraint; for the creature's
aspect was strangely repulsive and hideous.
Miriam felt her arm seized violently by Donatello. She looked at him, and
beheld a tigerlike fury gleaming from his wild eyes.
"Bid me drown him!" whispered he, shuddering between rage and horrible
disgust. "You shall hear his death gurgle in another instant!"
"Peace, peace, Donatello!" said Miriam soothingly, for this naturally
gentle and sportive being seemed all aflame with animal rage. "Do him no
mischief! He is mad; and we are as mad as he, if we suffer ourselves to
be disquieted by his antics. Let us leave him to bathe his hands till the
fountain run dry, if he find solace and pastime in it. What is it to you
or me, Donatello? There, there! Be quiet, foolish boy!"
Her tone and gesture were such as she might have used in taming down the
wrath of a faithful hound, that had taken upon himself to avenge some
supposed affront to his mistress. She smoothed the young man's curls
(for his fierce and sudden fury seemed to bristle among his hair), and
touched his cheek with her soft palm, till his angry mood was a little
assuaged.
"Signorina, do I look as when you first knew me?" asked he, with a heavy,
tremulous sigh, as they went onward, somewhat apart from their companions.
"Methinks there has been a change upon me, these many months; and more
and more, these last few days. The joy is gone out of my life; all gone!
all gone! Feel my hand! Is it not very hot? Ah; and my heart burns
hotter still!"
"My poor Donatello, you are ill!" said Miriam, with deep sympathy and
pity. "This melancholy and sickly Rome is stealing away the rich, joyous
life that belongs to you. Go back, my dear friend, to your home among the
hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were
filled with simple and blameless delights. Have you found aught in the
world that is worth' what you there enjoyed? Tell me truly, Donatello!"
"Yes!" replied the young man.
"And what, in Heaven's name?" asked she.
"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the midst
of it."
By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind them.
Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for the
party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were
hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.
Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the
Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum. All over the surface of
what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the
ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in
eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the
slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon
older ruin.
This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary, a
few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the
full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of the
old emperor's warlike deeds. In the area before it stands a grove of
stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple,
still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further
demolition. The modern edifices of the piazza (wholly built, no doubt,
out of the spoil of its old magnificence) look down into the hollow space
whence these pillars rise.
One of the immense gray granite shafts lay in the piazza, on the verge of
the area. It was a great, solid fact of the Past, making old Rome
actually sensible to the touch and eye; and no study of history, nor force
of thought, nor magic of song, could so vitally assure us that Rome once
existed, as this sturdy specimen of what its rulers and people wrought.
"And see!" said Kenyon, laying his hand upon it, "there is still a polish
remaining on the hard substance of the pillar; and even now, late as it is,
I can feel very sensibly the warmth of the noonday sun, which did its
best to heat it through. This shaft will endure forever. The polish of
eighteen centuries ago, as yet but half rubbed off, and the heat of
to-day's sunshine, lingering into the night, seem almost equally ephemeral
in relation to it."
"There is comfort to be found in the pillar," remarked Miriam, "hard and
heavy as it is. Lying here forever, as it will, it makes all human
trouble appear but a momentary annoyance."
"And human happiness as evanescent too," observed Hilda, sighing; "and
beautiful art hardly less so! I do not love to think that this dull stone,
merely by its massiveness, will last infinitely longer than any picture,
in spite of the spiritual life that ought to give it immortality!"
"My poor little Hilda," said Miriam, kissing her compassionately, "would
you sacrifice this greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the
transitoriness of all things, from the right of saying, in every
conjecture, 'This, too, will pass away,' would you give up this
unspeakable boon, for the sake of making a picture eternal?"
Their moralizing strain was interrupted by a demonstration from the rest
of the party, who, after talking and laughing together, suddenly joined
their voices, and shouted at full pitch,
"Trajan! Trajan!"
"Why do you deafen us with such an uproar?" inquired Miriam.
In truth, the whole piazza had been filled with their idle vociferation;
the echoes from the surrounding houses reverberating the cry of "Trajan,"
on all sides; as if there was a great search for that imperial personage,
and not so much as a handful of his ashes to be found.
"Why, it was a good opportunity to air our voices in this resounding
piazza," replied one of the artists. "Besides, we had really some hopes
of summoning Trajan to look at his column, which, you know, he never saw
in his lifetime. Here is your model (who, they say, lived and sinned
before Trajan's death) still wandering about Rome; and why not the Emperor
Trajan?"
"Dead emperors have very little delight in their columns, I am afraid,"
observed Kenyon. "All that rich sculpture of Trajan's bloody warfare,
twining from the base of the pillar to its capital, may be but an ugly
spectacle for his ghostly eyes, if he considers that this huge, storied
shaft must be laid before the judgment-seat, as a piece of the evidence of
what he did in the flesh. If ever I am employed to sculpture a hero's
monument, I shall think of this, as I put in the bas-reliefs of the
pedestal!"
"There are sermons in stones," said Hilda thoughtfully, smiling at
Kenyon's morality; "and especially in the stones of Rome."
The party moved on, but deviated a little from the straight way, in order
to glance at the ponderous remains of the temple of Mars Ultot, within
which a convent of nuns is now established,--a dove-cote, in the war-god's
mansion. At only a little distance, they passed the portico of a Temple
of Minerva, most rich and beautiful in architecture, but woefully gnawed
by time and shattered by violence, besides being buried midway in the
accumulation of soil, that rises over dead Rome like a flood tide. Within
this edifice of antique sanctity, a baker's shop was now established, with
an entrance on one side; for, everywhere, the remnants of old grandeur and
divinity have been made available for the meanest necessities of today.
"The baker is just drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon.
"Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge
for the desecration of her temple) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch,
if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in the
acetous fermentation."
They turned into the Via Alessandria, and thus gained the rear of the
Temple of Peace, and, passing beneath its great arches, pursued their way
along a hedge-bordered lane. In all probability, a stately Roman street
lay buried beneath that rustic-looking pathway; for they had now emerged
from the close and narrow avenues of the modern city, and were treading on
a soil where the seeds of antique grandeur had not yet produced the
squalid crop that elsewhere sprouts from them. Grassy as the lane was, it
skirted along heaps of shapeless ruin, and the bare site of the vast
temple that Hadrian planned and built. It terminated on the edge of a
somewhat abrupt descent, at the foot of which, with a muddy ditch between,
rose, in the bright moonlight, the great curving wall and multitudinous
arches of the Coliseum.
CHAPTER XVII
MIRIAM'S TROUBLE
As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within,
the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even too
distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that
inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination might
be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to shatter
it with a more picturesque decay. Byron's celebrated description is
better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind's eye, through
the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated it as if
with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.
The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar; others
on the steps of one of the Christian shrines. Goths and barbarians though
they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they belonged to the
gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit Italy. There was much
pastime and gayety just then in the area of the Coliseum, where so many
gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died, and where so much blood of
Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that fiercest of wild beasts, the
Roman populace of yore. Some youths and maidens were running merry races
across the open space, and playing at hide and seek a little way within
the duskiness of the ground tier of arches, whence now and then you could
hear the half-shriek, halflaugh of a frolicsome girl, whom the shadow had
betrayed into a young man's arms. Elder groups were seated on the
fragments of pillars and blocks of marble that lay round the verge of the
arena, talking in the quick, short ripple of the Italian tongue. On the
steps of the great black cross in the centre of the Coliseum sat a party
singing scraps of songs, with much laughter and merriment between the
stanzas.
It was a strange place for song and mirth. That black cross marks one of
the special blood-spots of the earth where, thousands of times over, the
dying gladiator fell, and more of human agony has been endured for the
mere pastime of the multitude than on the breadth of many battlefields.
From all this crime and suffering, however, the spot has derived a more
than common sanctity. An inscription promises seven years' indulgence,
seven years of remission from the pains of purgatory, and earlier
enjoyment of heavenly bliss, for each separate kiss imprinted on the black
cross. What better use could be made of life, after middle age, when the
accumulated sins are many and the remaining temptations few, than to spend
it all in kissing the black cross of the Coliseum!
Besides its central consecration, the whole area has been made sacred by a
range of shrines, which are erected round the circle, each commemorating
some scene or circumstance of the Saviour's passion and suffering. In
accordance with an ordinary custom, a pilgrim was making his progress from
shrine to shrine upon his knees, and saying a penitential prayer at each.
Light-footed girls ran across the path along which he crept, or sported
with their friends close by the shrines where he was kneeling. The
pilgrim took no heed, and the girls meant no irreverence; for in Italy
religion jostles along side by side with business and sport, after a
fashion of its own, and people are accustomed to kneel down and pray, or
see others praying, between two fits of merriment, or between two sins.
To make an end of our description, a red twinkle of light was visible amid
the breadth of shadow that fell across the upper part of the Coliseum.
Now it glimmered through a line of arches, or threw a broader gleam as it
rose out of some profound abyss of ruin; now it was muffled by a heap of
shrubbery which had adventurously clambered to that dizzy height; and so
the red light kept ascending to loftier and loftier ranges of the
structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky rested against
the Coliseum's topmost wall. It indicated a party of English or Americans
paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and exalting themselves with
raptures that were Byron's, not their own.
Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and the
steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow, the
present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost equal
share. Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their pursuits a
little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch the evanescent
fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above the heads of the
ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little imagination
individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman, common to their
class, entitling them to partake somewhat more bountifully than other
people in the thin delights of moonshine and romance.
"How delightful this is!" said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.
"Yes," said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side. "The Coliseum is
far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand persons
sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow creatures torn
by lions and tigers limb from limb. What a strange thought that the
Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to its best uses till
almost two thousand years after it was finished!"
"The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind," said Hilda, smiling;
"but I thank him none the less for building it."
"He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts he
pampered," rejoined Kenyon. "Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again."
"You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene," said Hilda.
"Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,"
replied the sculptor. "Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
Cellini's autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance draws
a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I suppose--and
raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his own eyes,--giants,
pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect, capering and dancing on
yonder walls. Those spectres must have been Romans, in their lifetime,
and frequenters of this bloody amphitheatre."
"I see a spectre, now!" said Hilda, with a little thrill of uneasiness.
"Have you watched that pilgrim, who is going round the whole circle of
shrines, on his knees, and praying with such fervency at every one? Now
that he has revolved so far in his orbit, and has the moonshine on his
face as he turns towards us, methinks I recognize him!"
"And so do I," said Kenyon. "Poor Miriam! Do you think she sees him?"
They looked round, and perceived that Miriam had risen from the steps of
the shrine and disappeared. She had shrunk back, in fact, into the deep
obscurity of an arch that opened just behind them.
Donatello, whose faithful watch was no more to be eluded than that of a
hound, had stolen after her, and became the innocent witness of a
spectacle that had its own kind of horror. Unaware of his presence, and
fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to gesticulate
extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly abroad,
stamping with her foot.
It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the
relief of a brief fit of madness. Persons in acute trouble, or laboring
under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone to
relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable, they
find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud.
Thus, as soon as she threw off her self-control, under the dusky arches of
the Coliseum, we may consider Miriam as a mad woman, concentrating the
elements of a long insanity into that instant.
"Signorina! signorina! have pity on me!" cried Donatello, approaching
her; "this is too terrible!"
"How dare you look, at me!" exclaimed Miriam, with a start; then,
whispering below her breath, "men have been struck dead for a less offence!"
"If you desire it, or need it," said Donatello humbly, "I shall not be
loath to die."
"Donatello," said Miriam, coming close to the young man, and speaking low,
but still the almost insanity of the moment vibrating in her voice, "if
you love yourself; if you desire those earthly blessings, such as you, of
all men, were made for; if you would come to a good old age among your
olive orchards and your Tuscan vines, as your forefathers did; if you
would leave children to enjoy the same peaceful, happy, innocent life,
then flee from me. Look not behind you! Get you gone without another
word." He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir. "I tell you," Miriam
went on, "there is a great evil hanging over me! I know it; I see it in
the sky; I feel it in the air! It will overwhelm me as utterly as if this
arch should crumble down upon our heads! It will crush you, too, if you
stand at my side! Depart, then; and make the sign of the cross, as your
faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh. Cast me off, or you are lost
forever."
A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello's face than had hitherto
seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.
"I will never quit you," he said; "you cannot drive me from you."
"Poor Donatello!" said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
than him. "Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is obstinate
to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you! They call me
beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the whole
world to my feet. And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty and my
gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy. Half-witted, they call
him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy. And I accept his aid!
To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all! Ah! what a sin to stain his
joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!"
She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it to
his lips. They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch; but
just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of the
shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been sitting.
There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to pray. It struck
Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face distinctly, that the
suppliant was merely performing an enjoined penance, and without the
penitence that ought to have given it effectual life. Even as he knelt,
his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that he had detected her, half
hidden as she was within the obscurity of the arch.
"He is evidently a good Catholic, however," whispered one of the party.
"After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
haunts the catacombs."
"The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him," said another;
"they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task."
The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble. Emerging from a
side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the Caesars;
portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents and modern
villas. They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over the broad
flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the Arch of Titus.
The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the seven-branched Jewish
candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior. The original of that
awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the yellow mud of the Tiber;
and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought to light, it would be the
most precious relic of past ages, in the estimation of both Jew and
Gentile.
Standing amid so much ancient dust, it is difficult to spare the reader
the commonplaces of enthusiasm, on which hundreds of tourists have already
insisted. Over this half-worn pavement, and beneath this Arch of Titus,
the Roman armies had trodden in their outward march, to fight battles a
world's width away. Returning victorious, with royal captives and
inestimable spoil, a Roman triumph, that most gorgeous pageant of earthly
pride, had streamed and flaunted in hundred-fold succession over these
same flagstones, and through this yet stalwart archway. It is politic,
however, to make few allusions to such a past; nor, if we would create an
interest in the characters of our story, is it wise to suggest how
Cicero's foot may have stepped on yonder stone, or how Horace was wont to
stroll near by, making his footsteps chime with the measure of the ode
that was ringing in his mind. The very ghosts of that massive and stately
epoch have so much density that the actual people of to-day seem the
thinner of the two, and stand more ghost-like by the arches and columns,
letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their ill-compacted
substance.
The party kept onward, often meeting pairs and groups of midnight
strollers like themselves. On such a moonlight night as this, Rome keeps
itself awake and stirring, and is full of song and pastime, the noise of
which mingles with your dreams, if you have gone betimes to bed. But it
is better to be abroad, and take our own share of the enjoyable time; for
the languor that weighs so heavily in the Roman atmosphere by day is
lightened beneath the moon and stars.
They had now reached the precincts of the Forum.
CHAPTER XVIII
ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
"Let us settle it," said Kenyon, stamping his foot firmly down, "that this
is precisely the spot where the chasm opened, into which Curtius
precipitated his good steed and himself. Imagine the great, dusky gap,
impenetrably deep, and with half-shaped monsters and hideous faces looming
upward out of it, to the vast affright of the good citizens who peeped
over the brim! There, now, is a subject, hitherto unthought of, for a
grim and ghastly story, and, methinks, with a moral as deep as the gulf
itself. Within it, beyond a question, there were prophetic visions,
--intimations of all the future calamities of Rome,--shades of Goths, and
Gauls, and even of the French soldiers of to-day. It was a pity to close
it up so soon! I would give much for a peep into such a chasm."
"I fancy," remarked Miriam, "that every person takes a peep into it in
moments of gloom and despondency; that is to say, in his moments of
deepest insight."
"Where is it, then?" asked Hilda. "I never peeped into it."
"Wait, and it will open for you," replied her friend. "The chasm was
merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us,
everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust
spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage
scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. A
footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we must step
very daintily, not to break through the crust at any moment. By and by,
we inevitably sink! It was a foolish piece of heroism in Curtius to
precipitate himself there, in advance; for all Rome, you see, has been
swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him. The Palace of the Caesars has
gone down thither, with a hollow, rumbling sound of its fragments! All
the temples have tumbled into it; and thousands of statues have been
thrown after! All the armies and the triumphs have marched into the great
chasm, with their martial music playing, as they stepped over the brink.
All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets! All piled upon poor Curtius,
who thought to have saved them all! I am loath to smile at the
self-conceit of that gallant horseman, but cannot well avoid it."
"It grieves me to hear you speak thus, Miriam," said Hilda, whose natural
and cheerful piety was shocked by her friend's gloomy view of human
destinies. "It seems to me that there is no chasm, nor any hideous
emptiness under our feet, except what the evil within us digs. If there
be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and
we shall tread safely to the other side. It was the guilt of Rome, no
doubt, that caused this gulf to open; and Curtius filled it up with his
heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism, which was the best virtue that the
old Romans knew. Every wrong thing makes the gulf deeper; every right one
helps to fill it up. As the evil of Rome was far more than its good, the
whole commonwealth finally sank into it, indeed, but of no original
necessity."
"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam
despondingly.
"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly
excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the
Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the cross,
--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf, and
formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet. The
blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward, and
that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too! Virginia, beyond all
question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are standing."
"Then the spot is hallowed forever!" said Hilda.
"Is there such blessed potency in bloodshed?" asked Miriam. "Nay, Hilda,
do not protest! I take your meaning rightly."
They again moved forward. And still, from the Forum and the Via Sacra,
from beneath the arches of the Temple of Peace on one side, and the
acclivity of the Palace of the Caesars on the other, there arose singing
voices of parties that were strolling through the moonlight. Thus, the
air was full of kindred melodies that encountered one.another, and twined
themselves into a broad, vague music, out of which no single strain could
be disentangled. These good examples, as well as the harmonious
influences of the hour, incited our artist friends to make proof of their
own vocal powers. With what skill and breath they had, they set up a
choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!" we believe, which those old Roman
echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat aright. Even
Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her country's song.
Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar with the air and
burden. But suddenly she threw out such a swell and gush of sound, that
it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other voices, and then to rise
above them all, and become audible in what would else have been thee
silence of an upper region. That volume of melodious voice was one of the
tokens of a great trouble. There had long been an impulse upon
her--amounting, at last, to a necessity to shriek aloud; but she had
struggled against it, till the thunderous anthem gave her an opportunity
to relieve her heart by a great cry.
They passed the solitary Column of Phocas, and looked down into the
excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and
shattered blocks and shafts--the crumbs of various ruin dropped from the
devouring maw of Time stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill.
That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now arose abruptly above
them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as
old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains any
substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now bears up
the great pile which the mediaeval builders raised on the antique
foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad upon a larger
page of deeper historic interest than any other scene can show. On the
same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will doubtless rise, and
vanish like ephemeral things.
To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman
history, and Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages
which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the
Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that a
chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark, rude,
unlettered centuries, around the birth-time of Christianity, as well as
the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the infancy of a
better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember these mediaeval
times, they look further off than the Augustan age. The reason may be,
that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for us an intimacy
with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming with the
subsequent ones.
The Italian climate, moreover, robs age of its reverence and makes it look
newer than it is. Not the Coliseum, nor the tombs of the Appian Way, nor
the oldest pillar in the Forum, nor any other Roman ruin, be it as
dilapidated as it may, ever give the impression of venerable antiquity
which we gather, along with the ivy, from the gray walls of an English
abbey or castle. And yet every brick or stone, which we pick up among the
former, had fallen ages before the foundation of the latter was begun.
This is owing to the kindliness with which Natures takes an English ruin
to her heart, covering it with ivy, as tenderly as Robin Redbreast covered
the dead babes with forest leaves. She strives to make it a part of
herself, gradually obliterating the handiwork of man, and supplanting it
with her own mosses and trailing verdure, till she has won the whole
structure back. But, in Italy, whenever man has once hewn a stone, Nature
forthwith relinquishes her right to it, and never lays her finger on it
again. Age after age finds it bare and naked, in the barren sunshine,
and leaves it so. Besides this natural disadvantage, too, each succeeding
century, in Rome, has done its best to ruin the very ruins, so far as
their picturesque effect is concerned, by stealing away the marble and
hewn stone, and leaving only yellow bricks, which never can look venerable.
The party ascended the winding way that leads from the Forum to the Piazza
of the Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. They stood
awhile to contemplate the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
The moonlight glistened upon traces of the gilding which had once covered
both rider and steed; these were almost gone, but the aspect of dignity
was still perfect, clothing the figure as it were with an imperial robe of
light. It is the most majestic representation of the kingly character
that ever the world has seen. A sight of the old heathen emperor is
enough to create an evanescent sentiment of loyalty even in a democratic
bosom, so august does he look, so fit to rule, so worthy of man's
profoundest homage and obedience, so inevitably attractive of his love.
He stretches forth his hand with an air of grand beneficence and unlimited
authority, as if uttering a decree from which no appeal was permissible,
but in which the obedient subject would find his highest interests
consulted; a command that was in itself a benediction.
"The sculptor of this statue knew what a king should be," observed Kenyon,
"and knew, likewise, the heart of mankind, and how it craves a true ruler,
under whatever title, as a child its father"
"O, if there were but one such man as this?" exclaimed Miriam. "One such
man in an age, and one in all the world; then how speedily would the
strife, wickedness, and sorrow of us poor creatures be relieved. We would
come to him with our griefs, whatever they might be,--even a poor, frail
woman burdened with her heavy heart,--and lay them at his feet, and never
need to take them up again. The rightful king would see to all."
"What an idea of the regal office and duty!" said Kenyon, with a smile.
"It is a woman's idea of the whole matter to perfection. It is Hilda's,
too, no doubt?"
"No," answered the quiet Hilda; "I should never look for such assistance
from an earthly king."
"Hilda, my religious Hilda," whispered Miriam, suddenly drawing the girl
close to her, "do you know how it is with me? I would give all I have or
hope--my life, O how freely--for one instant of your trust in God! You
little guess my need of it. You really think, then, that He sees and
cares for us?"
"Miriam, you frighten me."
"Hush, hush? do not let them hear yet!" whispered Miriam. "I frighten
you, you say; for Heaven's sake, how? Am I strange? Is there anything
wild in my behavior?"
"Only for that moment," replied Hilda, "because you seemed to doubt God's
providence."
"We will talk of that another time," said her friend. "Just now it is
very dark to me."
On the left of the Piazza of the Campidoglio, as you face cityward, and at
the head of the long and stately flight of steps descending from the
Capitoline Hill to the level of lower Rome, there is a narrow lane or
passage. Into this the party of our friends now turned. The path
ascended a little, and ran along under the walls of a palace, but soon
passed through a gateway, and terminated in a small paved courtyard. It
was bordered by a low parapet.
The spot, for some reason or other, impressed them as exceedingly lonely.
On one side was the great height of the palace, with the moonshine falling
over it, and showing all the windows barred and shuttered. Not a human
eye could look down into the little courtyard, even if the seemingly
deserted palace had a tenant. On all other sides of its narrow compass
there was nothing but the parapet, which as it now appeared was built
right on the edge of a steep precipice. Gazing from its imminent brow,
the party beheld a crowded confusion of roofs spreading over the whole
space between them and the line of hills that lay beyond the Tiber. A
long, misty wreath, just dense enough to catch a little of the moonshine,
floated above the houses, midway towards the hilly line, and showed the
course of the unseen river. Far away on the right, the moon gleamed on
the dome of St. Peter's as well as on many lesser and nearer domes.
"What a beautiful view of the city!" exclaimed Hilda; "and I never saw
Rome from this point before."
"It ought to afford a good prospect," said the sculptor; "for it was from
this point--at least we are at liberty to think so, if we choose--that
many a famous Roman caught his last glimpse of his native city, and of all
other earthly things. This is one of the sides of the Tarpeian Rock.
Look over the parapet, and see what a sheer tumble there might still be
for a traitor, in spite of the thirty feet of soil that have accumulated
at the foot of the precipice."
They all bent over, and saw that the cliff fell perpendicularly downward
to about the depth, or rather more, at which the tall palace rose in
height above their heads. Not that it was still the natural, shaggy front
of the original precipice; for it appeared to be cased in ancient
stonework, through which the primeval rock showed its face here and there
grimly and doubtfully. Mosses grew on the slight projections, and little
shrubs sprouted out of the crevices, but could not much soften the stern
aspect of the cliff. Brightly as the Italian moonlight fell adown the
height, it scarcely showed what portion of it was man's work and what was
nature's, but left it all in very much the same kind of ambiguity and
half-knowledge in which antiquarians generally leave the identity of Roman
remains.
The roofs of some poor-looking houses, which had been built against the
base and sides of the cliff, rose nearly midway to the top; but from an
angle of the parapet there was a precipitous plunge straight downward into
a stonepaved court.
"I prefer this to any other site as having been veritably the Traitor's
Leap," said Kenyon, "because it was so convenient to the Capitol. It was
an admirable idea of those stern old fellows to fling their political
criminals down from the very summit on which stood the Senate House and
Jove's Temple, emblems of the institutions which they sought to violate.
It symbolizes how sudden was the fall in those days from the utmost height
of ambition to its profoundest ruin."
"Come, come; it is midnight," cried another artist, "too late to be
moralizing here. We are literally dreaming on the edge of a precipice.
Let us go home."
"It is time, indeed," said Hilda.
The sculptor was not without hopes that he might be favored with the sweet
charge of escorting Hilda to the foot of her tower. Accordingly, when the
party prepared to turn back, he offered her his arm. Hilda at first
accepted it; but when they had partly threaded the passage between the
little courtyard and the Piazza del Campidoglio, she discovered that
Miriam had remained behind.
"I must go back," said she, withdrawing her arm from Kenyon's; "but pray
do not come with me. Several times this evening I have had a fancy that
Miriam had something on her mind, some sorrow or perplexity, which,
perhaps, it would relieve her to tell me about. No, no; do not turn back!
Donatello will be a sufficient guardian for Miriam and me."
The sculptor was a good deal mortified, and perhaps a little angry: but he
knew Hilda's mood of gentle decision and independence too well not to obey
her. He therefore suffered the fearless maiden to return alone.
Meanwhile Miriam had not noticed the departure of the rest of the company;
she remained on the edge of the precipice and Donatello along with her.
"It would be a fatal fall, still," she said to herself, looking over the
parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth. "Yes; surely yes!
Even without the weight of an overburdened heart, a human body would fall
heavily enough upon those stones to shake all its joints asunder. How
soon it would be over!"
Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed
closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet
and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination
which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling
himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily
back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before. He
then stood silent a brief space, struggling, perhaps, to make himself
conscious of the historic associations of the scene.
"What are you thinking of, Donatello?" asked Miriam.
"Who are they," said he, looking earnestly in her face, "who have been
flung over here in days gone by?"
"Men that cumbered the world," she replied. "Men whose lives were the
bane of their fellow creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the
common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes. There was short
work with such men in old Roman times. Just in the moment of their
triumph, a hand, as of an avenging giant, clutched them, and dashed the
wretches down this precipice."
"Was it well done?" asked the young man.
"It was well done," answered Miriam; "innocent persons were saved by the
destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom."
While this brief conversation passed, Donatello had once or twice glanced
aside with a watchful air, just as a hound may often be seen to take
sidelong note of some suspicious object, while he gives his more direct
attention to something nearer at, hand. Miriam seemed now first to become
aware of the silence that had followed upon the cheerful talk and laughter
of a few moments before.
Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had
retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always
an indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and only herself and
Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice.
Not so, however; not entirely alone! In the basement wall of the palace,
shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably
once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth
from it and approached Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some
unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was
the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick
despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her
natural promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dreamily to remember
falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment,
she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what
was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were really an actor and
sufferer in the scene.
Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned back
to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her
late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the
Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new stave of melody, in which her own
soft voice, as well as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, was sadly
missed.
The door of the little courtyard had swung upon its hinges, and partly
closed itself. Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her movements)
was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the noise of a
struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless instant.
Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful cry, which
quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering downward to the earth.
Then, a silence! Poor Hilda had looked into the court-yard, and saw the
whole quick passage of a deed, which took but that little time to grave
itself in the eternal adamant.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own
accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her hands,
and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have dilated,
and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired
him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an
intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom we
have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone
forever.
"What have you done?" said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashed out
again from his eyes.
"I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied. "I did what your
eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over
the precipice!"
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her
eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas!
looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she
could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a
wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his
mortal peril. Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the emotion
what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello flung his
victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went quivering
downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an
unutterable horror.
"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable. On
the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out,
as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square stones.
But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of mortality
while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do. No stir;
not a finger moved!
"You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. "Stone
dead! Would I were so, too!"
"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in
the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "There
was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath or
two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance,
when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him against your
will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and, in another
breath, you shall see me lying beside him."
"O, never!" cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"
She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned to
her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn
into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging
embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony
of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.
"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented to
what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together,
for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then
they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard, arm
in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to sever
themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear of the
terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them m solitude.
Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on the
instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a serpent, in inextricable
links about both their souls, and drew them into one, by its terrible
contractile power. It was closer than a marriage bond. So intimate, in
those first moments, was the union, that it seemed as if their new
sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that they were released from the
chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special law, had been created for them
alone. The world could not come near them; they were safe!
When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had been
the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the
merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. They
recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung in
cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; they
sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote
was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral
seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. But how close,
and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste, that lay
between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them one within
the other!
"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it took
a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken before,
"O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionshiP that knits
our heart-strings together?"
"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one
life!"
"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago, I
shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is
changed! There can be no more loneliness!"
"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.
"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had
taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion.
"None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have committed.
One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other
lives for evermore."
"For evermore, Miriam!" said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!"
The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that
consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more
noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that.
"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her
sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. "The deed has done its office,
and has no existence any more."
They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from
it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of
rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity,
which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence
that was forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and aspect.
Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of
carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were
among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have
haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's suggestion, they turned
aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's
Forum.
"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood like
ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"
"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.
"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--" and many another, whom the world
little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have
done within this hour!"
And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the
remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no such
refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals?
And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it,--or had
poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or clutched a
grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths,
--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands?
Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible thought, that an
individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes
us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,--makes us guilty of
the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but
members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at
each other.
"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself. "To-night, at least,
there shall be no remorse!"
Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street,
at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was a light in her
high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the glimmer of
these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam drew
Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some distance
looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw it open.
She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards the sky.
"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a
kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her
own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her
voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"
Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The window
was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy
curtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned
spirit was shut out of heaven.
CHAPTER XX
THE BURIAL CHANT
The Church of the Capuchins (where, as the reader may remember, some of
our acquaintances had made an engagement to meet) stands a little aside
from the Piazza Barberini. Thither, at the hour agreed upon, on the
morning after the scenes last described, Miriam and Donatello directed
their steps. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their
trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put
a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if
suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
Yet how tame and wearisome is the impression of all ordinary things in the
contrast with such a fact! How sick and tremulous, the next morning, is
the spirit that has dared so much only the night before! How icy cold is
the heart, when the fervor, the wild ecstasy of passion has faded away,
and sunk down among the dead ashes of the fire that blazed so fiercely,
and was fed by the very substance of its life! How faintly does the
criminal stagger onward, lacking the impulse of that strong madness that
hurried him into guilt, and treacherously deserts him in the midst of it!
When Miriam and Donatello drew near the church, they found only Kenyon
awaiting them on the steps. Hilda had likewise promised to be of the
party, but had not yet appeared. Meeting the sculptor, Miriam put a force
upon herself and succeeded in creating an artificial flow of spirits,
which, to any but the nicest observation, was quite as effective as a
natural one. She spoke sympathizingly to the sculptor on the subject of
Hilda's absence, and somewhat annoyed him by alluding in Donatello's
hearing to an attachment which had never been openly avowed, though
perhaps plainly enough betrayed. He fancied that Miriam did not quite
recognize the limits of the strictest delicacy; he even went so far as to
generalize, and conclude within himself, that this deficiency is a more
general failing in woman than in man, the highest refinement being a
masculine attribute.
But the idea was unjust to the sex at large, and especially so to this
poor Miriam, who was hardly responsible for her frantic efforts to be gay.
Possibly, moreover, the nice action of the mind is set ajar by any
violent shock, as of great misfortune or great crime, so that the finer
perceptions may be blurred thenceforth, and the effect be traceable in all
the minutest conduct of life.
"Did you see anything of the dear child after you left us?" asked Miriam,
still keeping Hilda as her topic of conversation. "I missed her sadly on
my way homeward; for nothing insures me such delightful and innocent
dreams (I have experienced it twenty times)as a talk late in the evening
with Hilda."
"So I should imagine," said the sculptor gravely; "but it is an advantage
that I have little or no opportunity of enjoying. I know not what became
of Hilda after my parting from you. She was not especially my companion
in any part of our walk. The last I saw of her she was hastening back to
rejoin you in the courtyard of the Palazzo Caffarelli."
"Impossible!" cried Miriam, starting.
"Then did you not see her again?" inquired Kenyon, in some alarm.
"Not there," answered Miriam quietly; "indeed, I followed pretty closely
on the heels of the rest of the party. But do not be alarmed on Hilda's
account; the Virgin is bound to watch over the good child, for the sake of
the piety with which she keeps the lamp alight at her shrine. And besides,
I have always felt that Hilda is just as safe in these evil streets of
Rome as her white doves when they fly downwards from the tower top, and
run to and fro among the horses' feet. There is certainly a providence on
purpose for Hilda, if for no other human creature."
"I religiously believe it," rejoined the sculptor; "and yet my mind would
be the easier, if I knew that she had returned safely to her tower."
"Then make yourself quite easy," answered Miriam. "I saw her (and it is
the last sweet sight that I remember) leaning from her window midway
between earth and sky!"
Kenyon now looked at Donatello.
"You seem out of spirits, my dear friend," he observed. "This languid
Roman atmosphere is not the airy wine that you were accustomed to breathe
at home. I have not forgotten your hospitable invitation to meet you this
summer at your castle among the Apennines. It is my fixed purpose to
come, I assure you. We shall both be the better for some deep draughts
of the mountain breezes."
"It may he," said Donatello, with unwonted sombreness; "the old house
seemed joyous when I was a child. But as I remember it now it was a grim
place, too."
The sculptor looked more attentively at the young man, and was surprised
and alarmed to observe how entirely the fine, fresh glow of animal spirits
had departed out of his face. Hitherto, moreover, even while he was
standing perfectly still, there had been a kind of possible gambol
indicated in his aspect. It was quite gone now. All his youthful gayety,
and with it his simplicity of manner, was eclipsed, if not utterly extinct.
"You are surely ill, my dear fellow," exclaimed Kenyon.
"Am I? Perhaps so," said Donatello indifferently; "I never have been ill,
and know not what it may be."
"Do not make the poor lad fancy-sink," whispered Miriam, pulling the
sculptor's sleeve. "He is of a nature to lie down and die at once, if he
finds himself drawing such melancholy breaths as we ordinary people are
enforced to burden our lungs withal. But we must get him away from this
old, dreamy and dreary Rome, where nobody but himself ever thought of
being gay. Its influences are too heavy to sustain the life of such a
creature."
The above conversation had passed chiefly on the steps of the Cappuccini;
and, having said so much, Miriam lifted the leathern curtain that hangs
before all church-doors in italy.
"
Hilda has forgotten her appointment," she observed, "or else her maiden
slumbers are very sound this morning. We will wait for her no longer."
They entered the nave. The interior of the church was of moderate compass,
but of good architecture, with a vaulted roof over the nave, and a row of
dusky chapels on either side of it instead of the customary side-aisles.
Each chapel had its saintly shrine, hung round with offerings; its picture
above the altar, although closely veiled, if by any painter of renown; and
its hallowed tapers, burning continually, to set alight the devotion of
the worshippers. The pavement of the nave was chiefly of marble, and
looked old and broken, and was shabbily patched here and there with tiles
of brick; it was inlaid, moreover, with tombstones of the mediaeval taste,
on which were quaintly sculptured borders, figures, and portraits in
bas-relief, and Latin epitaphs, now grown illegible by the tread of
footsteps over them. The church appertains to a convent of Capuchin monks;
and, as usually happens when a reverend brotherhood have such an edifice
in charge, the floor seemed never to have been scrubbed or swept, and had
as little the aspect of sanctity as a kennel; whereas, in all churches of
nunneries, the maiden sisterhood invariably show the purity of their own
hearts by the virgin cleanliness and visible consecration of the walls and
pavement.
As our friends entered the church, their eyes rested at once on a
remarkable object in the centre of the nave. It was either the actual
body, or, as might rather have been supposed at first glance, the
cunningly wrought waxen face and suitably draped figure of a dead monk.
This image of wax or clay-cold reality, whichever it might be, lay on a
slightly elevated bier, with three tall candles burning on each side,
another tall candle at the head, and another at the foot. There was music,
too; in harmony with so funereal a spectacle. From beneath the pavement
of the church came the deep, lugubrious strain of a De Profundis, which
sounded like an utterance of the tomb itself; so dismally did it rumble
through the burial vaults, and ooze up among the flat gravestones and sad
epitaphs, filling the church as with a gloomy mist.
"I must look more closely at that dead monk before we leave the church,"
remarked the sculptor. "In the study of my art, I have gained many a hint
from the dead which the living could never have given me."
"I can well imagine it," answered Miriam. "One clay image is readily
copied from another. But let us first see Guido's picture. The light is
favorable now."
Accordingly, they turned into the first chapel on the right hand, as you
enter the nave; and there they beheld,--not the picture, indeed,--but a
closely drawn curtain. The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of
sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been
created; that of opening the way; for religious sentiment through the
quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints, and martyrs down
visibly upon earth; of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught they
know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a paltry fee.
Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a veil, and seldom
revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an object of devotion,
and value it only for its artistic merit.
The sacristan was quickly found, however, and lost no time in disclosing
the youthful Archangel, setting his divine foot on the head of his fallen
adversary. It was an image of that greatest of future events, which we
hope for so ardently, at least, while we are young,--but find so very long
in coming, the triumph of goodness over the evil principle.
"Where can Hilda be?" exclaimed Kenyon. "It is not her custom ever to
fail in an engagement; and the present one was made entirely on her
account. Except herself, you know, we were all agreed in our recollection
of the picture."
"But we were wrong, and Hilda right, as you perceive," said Miriam,
directing his attention to the point on which their dispute of the night
before had arisen. "It is not easy to detect her astray as regards any
picture on which those clear, soft eyes of hers have ever rested."
"And she has studied and admired few pictures so much as this," observed
the sculptor. "No wonder; for there is hardly another so beautiful in
the world. What an expression of heavenly severity in the Archangel's
face! There is a degree of pain, trouble, and disgust at being brought in
contact with sin, even for the purpose of quelling and punishing it; and
yet a celestial tranquillity pervades his whole being."
"I have never been able," said Miriam, "to admire this picture nearly so
much as Hilda does, in its moral and intellectual aspect. If it cost her
more trouble to be good, if her soul were less white and pure, she would
be a more competent critic of this picture, and would estimate it not half
so high. I see its defects today more clearly than ever before."
"What are some of them?" asked Kenyon.
"That Archangel, now," Miriam continued; "how fair he looks, with his
unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and clad in his bright armor,
and that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the latest
Paradisiacal mode! What a dainty air of the first celestial society!
With what half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandalled foot on
the head of his prostrate foe! But, is it thus that virtue looks the
moment after its death struggle with evil? No, no; I could have told
Guido better. A full third of the Archangel's feathers should have been
torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan's
own! His sword should be streaming with blood, and perhaps broken halfway
to the hilt; his armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory; a
bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern scowl of battle!
He should press his foot hard down upon the old serpent, as if his very
soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and doubting whether
the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might turn! And, with
all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable horror, there should
still be something high, tender, and holy in Michael's eyes, and around
his mouth. But the battle never was such a child's play as Guido's dapper
Archangel seems to have found it."
"For Heaven's sake, Miriam," cried Kenyon, astonished at the wild energy
of her talk; "paint the picture of man's struggle against sin according to
your own idea! I think it will be a masterpiece."
"The picture would have its share of truth, I assure you," she answered;
"but I am sadly afraid the victory would fail on the wrong side. Just
fancy a smoke-blackened, fiery-eyed demon bestriding that nice young angel,
clutching his white throat with one of his hinder claws; and giving a
triumphant whisk of his scaly tail, with a poisonous dart at the end of it!
That is what they risk, poor souls, who do battle with Michael's enemy."
It now, perhaps, struck Miriam that her mental disquietude was impelling
her to an undue vivacity; for she paused, and turned away from the picture,
without saying a word more about it. All this while, moreover, Donatello
had been very ill at ease, casting awe-stricken and inquiring glances at
the dead monk; as if he could look nowhere but at that ghastly object,
merely because it shocked him. Death has probably a peculiar horror and
ugliness, when forced upon the contemplation of a person so naturally
joyous as Donatello, who lived with completeness in the present moment,
and was able to form but vague images of the future.
"What is the matter, Donatello?" whispered Miriam soothingly. "You are
quite in a tremble, my poor friend! What is it?"
"This awful chant from beneath the church,," answered Donatello; "it
oppresses me; the air is so heavy with it that I can scarcely draw my
breath. And yonder dead monk! I feel as if he were lying right across my
heart."
"Take courage!" whispered she again "come, we will approach close to the
dead monk. The only way, in such cases, is to stare the ugly horror
right in the face; never a sidelong glance, nor half-look, for those are
what show a frightfill thing in its frightfullest aspect. Lean on me,
dearest friend! My heart is very strong for both of us. Be brave; and
all is well."
Donatello hung back for a moment, but then pressed close to Miriam's side,
and suffered her to lead him up to the bier. The sculptor followed. A
number of persons, chiefly women, with several children among them, were
standing about the corpse; and as our three friends drew nigh, a mother
knelt down, and caused her little boy to kneel, both kissing the beads and
crucifix that hung from the monk's girdle. Possibly he had died in the
odor of sanctity; or, at all events, death and his brown frock and cowl
made a sacred image of this reverend father.
CHAPTER XXI
THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
The dead monk was clad, as when alive, in the brown woollen frock of the
Capuchins, with the hood drawn over his head, but so as to leave the
features and a portion of the beard uncovered. His rosary and cross hung
at his side; his hands were folded over his breast; his feet (he was of a
barefooted order in his lifetime, and continued so in death) protruded
from beneath his habit, stiff and stark, with a more waxen look than even
his face. They were tied together at the ankles with a black ribbon.
The countenance, as we have already said, was fully displayed. It had a
purplish hue upon it, unlike the paleness of an ordinary corpse, but as
little resembling the flush of natural life. The eyelids were but
partially drawn down, and showed the eyeballs beneath; as if the deceased
friar were stealing a glimpse at the bystanders, to watch whether they
were duly impressed with the solemnity of his obsequies. The shaggy
eyebrows gave sternness to the look. Miriam passed between two of the
lighted candles, and stood close beside the bier.
"My God!" murmured she. "What is this?"
She grasped Donatello's hand, and, at the same instant, felt him give a
convulsive shudder, which she knew to have been caused by a sudden and
terrible throb of the heart. His hand, by an instantaneous change, became
like ice within hers, which likewise grew so icy that their insensible
fingers might have rattled, one against the other. No wonder that their
blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leaped and paused! The dead
face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed eyelids, was the
same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the past midnight, as
Donatello flung him over the precipice.
The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen
the monk's features.
"Those naked feet!" said he. "I know not why, but they affect me
strangely. They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome,
and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where the monk went
begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors of
his convent, too, from his youth upward! It is a suggestive idea, to
track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden,
ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold
as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."
As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made no
response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the head of
the bier. He advanced thither himself.
"Ha!" exclaimed he.
He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew it
immediately. Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be, even
a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least degree for
this man's sudden death. In truth, it seemed too wild a thought to
connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months and the
vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin of to-day. It
resembled one of those unaccountable changes and interminglings of
identity, which so often occur among the personages of a dream. But
Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art, was endowed with
an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give him intimations of
the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual vision. There was a
whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking himself wherefore, he
resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious discovery which he had
made, and to leave any remark or exclamation to be voluntarily offered by
Miriam. If she never spoke, then let the riddle be unsolved.
And now occurred a circumstance that would seem too fantastic to be told,
if it had not actually happened, precisely as we set it down. As the
three friends stood by the bier, they saw that a little stream of blood
had begun to ooze from the dead monk's nostrils; it crept slowly towards
the thicket of his beard, where, in the course of a moment or two, it hid
itself.
"How strange!" ejaculated Kenyon. "The monk died of apoplexy, I suppose,
or by some sudden accident, and the blood has not yet congealed."
"Do you consider that a sufficient explanation?" asked Miriam, with a
smile from which the sculptor involuntarily turned away his eyes. "Does
it satisfy you?"
"And why not?" he inquired.
"Of course, you know the old superstition about this phenomenon of blood
flowing from a dead body," she rejoined. "How can we tell but that the
murderer of this monk (or, possibly, it may be only that privileged
murderer, his physician) may have just entered the church?"
"I cannot jest about it," said Kenyon. "It is an ugly sight!"
"True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!" she replied, with one of those
long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by escaping
unexpectedly. "We will not look at it any more. Come away, Donatello.
Let us escape from this dismal church. The sunshine will do you good."
When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this! By no possible
supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin,
quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with
that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the
precipice. The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and
unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the
likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance. It was
a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed to
behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand ways,
and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and in its
innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one dead visage.
No sooner had Miriam turned away from the bier, and gone a few steps, than
she fancied the likeness altogether an illusion, which would vanish at a
closer and colder view. She must look at it again, therefore, and at once;
or else the grave would close over the face, and leave the awful fantasy
that had connected itself therewith fixed ineffaceably in her brain.
"Wait for me, one moment!" she said to her companions. "Only a moment!"
So she went back, and gazed once more at the corpse. Yes; these were the
features that Miriam had known so well; this was the visage that she
remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends
suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her
sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood with
crime. But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something originally
noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul had stamped
upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam now quailed and
shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, but for the severe,
reproachful glance that seemed to come from between those half-closed lids.
True, there had been nothing, in his lifetime, viler than this man.
She knew it; there was no other fact within her consciousness that she
felt to be so certain; and yet, because her persecutor found himself safe
and irrefutable in death, he frowned upon his victim, and threw back the
blame on her!
"Is it thou, indeed?" she murmured, under her breath. "Then thou hast no
right to scowl upon me so! But art thou real, or a vision?" She bent down
over the dead monk, till one of her rich curls brushed against his
forehead. She touched one of his folded hands with her finger.
"It is he," said Miriam. "There is the scar, that I know so well, on his
brow. And it is no vision; he is palpable to my touch! I will question
the fact no longer, but deal with it as I best can."
It was wonderful to see how the crisis developed in Miriam its own proper
strength, and the faculty of sustaining the demands which it made upon her
fortitude. She ceased to tremble; the beautiful woman gazed sternly at
her dead enemy, endeavoring to meet and quell the look of accusation that
he threw from between his half-closed eyelids.
"No; thou shalt not scowl me down!" said she. "Neither now, nor when we
stand together at the judgment-seat. I fear not to meet thee there.
Farewell, till that next encounter!"
Haughtily waving her hand, Miriam rejoined her friends, who were awaiting
her at the door of the church. As they went out, the sacristan stopped
them, and proposed to show the cemetery of the convent, where the deceased
members of the fraternity are laid to rest in sacred earth, brought long
ago from Jerusalem.
"And will yonder monk be buried there?" she asked.
"Brother Antonio?" exclaimed the sacristan.
"Surely, our good brother will be put to bed there! His grave is already
dug, and the last occupant has made room for him. Will you look at it,
signorina?"
"I will!" said Miriam.
"Then excuse me," observed Kenyon; "for I shall leave you. One dead monk
has more than sufficed me; and I am not bold enough to face the whole
mortality of the convent."
It was easy to see, by Donatello's looks, that he, as well as the sculptor,
would gladly have escaped a visit to the famous cemetery of the
Cappuccini. But Miriam's nerves were strained to such a pitch, that she
anticipated a certain solace and absolute relief in passing from one
ghastly spectacle to another of long-accumulated ugliness; and there was,
besides, a singular sense of duty which impelled her to look at the final
resting-place of the being whose fate had been so disastrously involved
with her own. She therefore followed the sacristan's guidance, and drew
her companion along with her, whispering encouragement as they went.
The cemetery is beneath the church, but entirely above ground, and lighted
by a row of iron-grated windows without glass. A corridor runs along
beside these windows, and gives access to three or four vaulted recesses,
or chapels, of considerable breadth and height, the floor of which
consists of the consecrated earth of Jerusalem. It is smoothed decorously
over the deceased brethren of the convent, and is kept quite free from
grass or weeds, such as would grow even in these gloomy recesses, if pains
were not bestowed to root them up. But, as the cemetery is small, and it
is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are
immemorially accustomed, when one of their number dies, to take the
longest buried skeleton out of the oldest grave, and lay the new slumberer
there instead. Thus, each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the
luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being
forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for
another lodger.
The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special
interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial
recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of
thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears to be
of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange
architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and the more
delicate tracery by the Smaller bones of the human frame. The summits of
the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were
wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of
describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain
artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this
queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many hundred
years, must have contributed their bony framework to build up. these
great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are inscriptions,
purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular
headpiece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are
piled up indistinguishably into the architectural design, like the many
deaths that make up the one glory of a victory.
In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or
stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labelled with
their names and the dates of their decease. Their skulls (some quite
bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known
the earth-damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously
repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died
in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now
screeching through eternity. As a general thing, however, these frocked
and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of their position,
and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But the cemetery of
the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes: the soul sinks
forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty death; the holy earth
from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality, has grown as barren of the
flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds and grass. Thank Heaven for
its blue sky; it needs a long, upward gaze to give us back our faith. Not
here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars in these
chapels of horrible consecration are heaps of human bones.
Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no
disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of so
many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their
departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so
unexceptionably.
Miriam went gloomily along the corridor, from one vaulted Golgotha to
another, until in the farthest recess she beheld an open grave.
"Is that for him who lies yonder in the nave?" she asked.
"Yes, signorina, this is to be the resting-place of Brother Antonio, who
came to his death last night," answered the sacristan; "and in yonder
niche, you see, sits a brother who was buried thirty years ago, and has
risen to give him place."
"It is not a satisfactory idea," observed Miriam, "that you poor friars
cannot call even your graves permanently your own. You must lie down in
them, methinks, with a nervous anticipation of being disturbed, like weary
men who know that they shall be summoned out of bed at midnight. Is it
not possible (if money were to be paid for the privilege) to leave Brother
Antonio--if that be his name--in the occupancy of that narrow grave till
the last trumpet sounds?"
"By no means, signorina; neither is it needful or desirable," answered the
sacristan. "A quarter of a century's sleep in the sweet earth of
Jerusalem is better than a thousand years in any other soil. Our brethren
find good rest there. No ghost was ever known to steal out of this
blessed cemetery."
"That is well," responded Miriam; "may he whom you now lay to sleep prove
no exception to the rule!"
As they left the cemetery she put money into the sacristan's hand to an
amount that made his eyes open wide and glisten, and requested that it
might be expended in masses for the repose of Father Antonio's soul.
CHAPTER XXII
THE MEDICI GARDENS
Donatello," said Miriam anxiously, as they came through the Piazza
Barberini, "what can I do for you, my beloved friend? You are shaking as
with the cold fit of the Roman fever." "Yes," said Donatello; "my heart
shivers." As soon as she could collect her thoughts, Miriam led the young
man to the gardens of the Villa Medici, hoping that the quiet shade and
sunshine of that delightful retreat would a little revive his spirits.
The grounds are there laid out in the old fashion of straight paths, with
borders of box, which form hedges of great height and density, and are
shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of stone, at the top and sides.
There are green alleys, with long vistas overshadowed by ilex-trees; and
at each intersection of the paths, the visitor finds seats of
lichen-covered stone to repose upon, and marble statues that look
forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In the more open
portions of the garden, before the sculptured front of the villa, you see
fountains and flower-beds, and in their season a profusion of roses, from
which the genial sun of Italy distils a fragrance, to be scattered abroad
by the no less genial breeze.
But Donatello drew no delight from these things. He walked onward in
silent apathy, and looked at Miriam with strangely half-awakened and
bewildered eyes, when she sought to bring his mind into sympathy with hers,
and so relieve his heart of the burden that lay lumpishly upon it.
She made him sit down on a stone bench, where two embowered alleys crossed
each other; so that they could discern the approach of any casual intruder
a long way down the path.
"My sweet friend," she said, taking one of his passive hands in both of
hers, "what can I say to comfort you?"
"Nothing!" replied Donatello, with sombre reserve. "Nothing will ever
comfort me."
"I accept my own misery," continued Miriam, "my own guilt, if guilt it be;
and, whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it. But you,
dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this world, and
seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling,--you, whom I half fancied
to belong to a race that had vanished forever, you only surviving, to show
mankind how genial and how joyous life used to be, in some long-gone age,
--what had you to do with grief or crime?"
"They came to me as to other men," said Donatello broodingly. "Doubtless
I was born to them."
"No, no; they came with me," replied Miriam. "Mine is the responsibility!
Alas! wherefore was I born? Why did we ever meet? Why did I not drive
you from me, knowing for my heart foreboded it--that the cloud in which I
walked would likewise envelop you!"
Donatello stirred uneasily, with the irritable impatience that is often
combined With a mood of leaden despondency. A brown lizard with two
tails--a monster often engendered by the Roman sunshine--ran across his
foot, and made him start. Then he sat silent awhile, and so did Miriam,
trying to dissolve her whole heart into sympathy, and lavish it all upon
him, were it only for a moment's cordial.
The young man lifted his hand to his breast, and, unintentionally, as
Miriam's hand was within his, he lifted that along with it. "I have a
great weight here!" said he. The fancy struck Miriam (but she drove it
resolutely down) that Donatello almost imperceptibly shuddered, while, in
pressing his own hand against his heart, he pressed hers there too.
"Rest your heart on me, dearest one!" she resumed. "Let me bear all its
weight; I am well able to bear it; for I am a woman, and I love you! I
love you, Donatello! Is there no comfort for you in this avowal? Look at
me! Heretofore you have found me pleasant to your sight. Gaze into my
eyes! Gaze into my soul! Search as deeply as you may, you can never see
half the tenderness and devotion that I henceforth cherish for you. All
that I ask is your acceptance of the utter self-sacrifice (but it shall be
no sacrifice, to my great love) with which I seek to remedy the evil you
have incurred for my sake!"
All this fervor on Miriam's part; on Donatello's, a heavy silence.
"O, speak to me!" she exclaimed. "Only promise me to be, by and by, a
little happy!"
"Happy?" murmured Donatello. "Ah, never again! never again!"
"Never? Ah, that is a terrible word to say to me!" answered Miriam. "A
terrible word to let fall upon a woman's heart, when she loves you, and is
conscious of having caused your misery! If you love me, Donatello, speak
it not again. And surely you did love me?"
"I did," replied Donatello gloomily and absently.
Miriam released the young man's hand, but suffered one of her own to lie
close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make any effort
to retain it. There was much depending upon that simple experiment.
With a deep sigh--as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a troubled
dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his hands over his
forehead. The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling into May was in the
atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw that involuntary movement and
heard that sigh of relief (for so she interpreted it), a shiver ran
through her frame, as if the iciest wind of the Apennines were blowing
over her.
"He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of," thought she, with
unutterable compassion. "Alas! it was a sad mistake! He might have had
a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been impelled to
it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that terrible moment,
mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself against the natural
remorse. But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder (and such was his
crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions, made it otherwise) on
no better warrant than a boy's idle fantasy! I pity him from the very
depths of my soul! As for myself, I am past my own or other's pity."
She arose from the young man's side, and stood before him with a sad,
commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing, in him,
a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon herself.
"Donatello, we must part," she said, with melancholy firmness. "Yes;
leave me! Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley you
have told me of among the Apennines. Then, all that has passed will be
recognized as but an ugly dream. For in dreams the conscience sleeps, and
we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable in our
waking moments. The deed you seemed to do, last night, was no more than
such a dream; there was as little substance in what you fancied yourself
doing. Go; and forget it all!"
"Ah, that terrible face!" said Donatello, pressing his hands over his
eyes. "Do you call that unreal?"
"Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes," replied Miriam. "It was
unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this
face of mine no more. Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it
has lost its charm. Yet it would still retain a miserable potency' to
bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish
that would darken all your life. Leave me, therefore, and forget me."
"Forget you, Miriam!" said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of
despair.
"If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful visage
which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation, at least,
if not a joy."
"But since that visage haunts you along with mine," rejoined Miriam,
glancing behind her, "we needs must part. Farewell, then! But if
ever--in distress, peril, shame, poverty, or whatever anguish is most
poignant, whatever burden heaviest--you should require a life to be given
wholly, only to make your own a little easier, then summon me! As the
case now stands between us, you have bought me dear, and find me of little
worth. Fling me away, therefore! May you never need me more! But, if
otherwise, a wish--almost an unuttered wish will bring me to you!"
She stood a moment, expecting a reply. But Donatello's eyes had again
fallen on the ground, and he had not, in his bewildered mind and
overburdened heart, a word to respond.
"That hour I speak of may never come," said Miriam. "So
farewell--farewell forever."
"Farewell," said Donatello.
His voice hardly made its way through the environment of unaccustomed
thoughts and emotions which had settled over him like a dense and dark
cloud. Not improbably, he beheld Miriam through so dim a medium that she
looked visionary; heard her speak only in a thin, faint echo.
She turned from the young man, and, much as her heart yearned towards him,
she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace, or even a pressure
of the hand. So soon after the semblance of such mighty love, and after
it had been the impulse to so terrible a deed, they parted, in all outward
show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual intercourse has been
encircled within a single hour.
And Donatello, when Miriam had departed, stretched himself at full length
on the stone bench, and drew his hat over his eyes, as the idle and
light-hearted youths of dreamy Italy are accustomed to do, when they lie
down in the first convenient shade, and snatch a noonday slumber. A
stupor was upon him, which he mistook for such drowsiness as he had known
in his innocent past life. But, by and by, he raised himself slowly and
left the garden. Sometimes poor Donatello started, as if he heard a
shriek; sometimes he shrank back, as if a face, fearful to behold, were
thrust close to his own. In this dismal mood, bewildered with the
novelty of sin and grief, he had little left of that singular resemblance,
on account of which, and for their sport, his three friends had
fantastically recognized him as the veritable Faun of Praxiteles.
CHAPTER XXIII
MIRIAM AND HILDA
On leaving the Medici Gardens Miriam felt herself astray in the world; and
having no special reason to seek one place more than another, she suffered
chance to direct her steps as it would. Thus it happened, that, involving
herself in the crookedness of Rome, she saw Hilda's tower rising before
her, and was put in mind to climb to the young girl's eyry, and ask why
she had broken her engagement at the church of the Capuchins. People
often do the idlest acts of their lifetime in their heaviest and most
anxious moments; so that it would have been no wonder had Miriam been
impelled only by so slight a motive of curiosity as we have indicated.
But she remembered, too, and with a quaking heart, what the sculptor had
mentioned of Hilda's retracing her steps towards the courtyard of the
Palazzo Caffarelli in quest of Miriam herself. Had she been compelled to
choose between infamy in the eyes of the whole world, or in Hilda's eyes
alone, she would unhesitatingly have accepted the former, on condition of
remaining spotless in the estimation of her white-souled friend. This
possibility, therefore, that Hilda had witnessed the scene of the past
night, was unquestionably the cause that drew Miriam to the tower, and
made her linger and falter as she approached it.
As she drew near, there were tokens to which her disturbed mind gave a
sinister interpretation. Some of her friend's airy family, the doves,
with their heads imbedded disconsolately in their bosoms, were huddled in
a corner of the piazza; others had alighted on the heads, wings, shoulders,
and trumpets of the marble angels which adorned the facade of the
neighboring church; two or three had betaken themselves to the Virgin's
shrine; and as many as could find room were sitting on Hilda's window-sill.
But all of them, so Miriam fancied, had a look of weary expectation and
disappointment, no flights, no flutterings, no cooing murmur; something
that ought to have made their day glad and bright was evidently left out
of this day's history. And, furthermore, Hilda's white windowcurtain was
closely drawn, with only that one little aperture at the side, which
Miriam remembered noticing the night before.
"Be quiet," said Miriam to her own heart, pressing her hand hard upon it.
"Why shouldst thou throb now? Hast thou not endured more terrible things
than this?"
Whatever were her apprehensions, she would not turn back. It might
be--and the solace would be worth a world--that Hilda, knowing nothing of
the past night's calamity, would greet her friend with a sunny smile, and
so restore a portion of the vital warmth, for lack of which her soul was
frozen. But could Miriam, guilty as she was, permit Hilda to kiss her
cheek, to clasp her hand, and thus be no longer so unspotted from the
world as heretofore
"I will never permit her sweet touch again," said Miriam, toiling up the
staircase, "if I can find strength of heart to forbid it. But, O! it
would be so soothing in this wintry fever-fit of my heart. There can be
no harm to my white Hilda in one parting kiss. That shall be all!"
But, on reaching the upper landing-place, Miriam paused, and stirred not
again till she had brought herself to an immovable resolve.
"My lips, my hand, shall never meet Hilda's more," said she.
Meanwhile, Hilda sat listlessly in her painting-room. Had you looked into
the little adjoining chamber, you might have seen the slight imprint of
her figure on the bed, but would also have detected at once that the white
counterpane had not been turned down. The pillow was more disturbed; she
had turned her face upon it, the poor child, and bedewed it with some of
those tears (among the most chill and forlorn that gush from human sorrow)
which the innocent heart pours forth at its first actual discovery that
sin is in the world. The young and pure are not apt to find out that
miserable truth until it is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some
trusted friend. They may have heard much of the evil of the world, and
seem to know it, but only as an impalpable theory. In due time, some
mortal, whom they reverence too highly, is commissioned by Providence to
teach them this direful lesson; he perpetrates a sin; and Adam falls anew,
and Paradise, heretofore in unfaded bloom, is lost again, and dosed
forever, with the fiery swords gleaming at its gates.
The chair in which Hilda sat was near the portrait of Beatrice Cenci,
which had not yet been taken from the easel. It is a peculiarity of this
picture, that its profoundest expression eludes a straightforward glance,
and can only be caught by side glimpses, or when the eye falls casually
upon it; even as if the painted face had a life and consciousness of its
own, and, resolving not to betray its secret of grief or guilt, permitted
the true tokens to come forth only when it imagined itself unseen. No
other such magical effect has ever been wrought by pencil.
Now, opposite the easel hung a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face and
Hilda's were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes of
position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in both
these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied--nor was it
without horror--that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in a
moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from it as
timorously.
"Am I, too, stained with guilt?" thought the poor girl, hiding her face
in her hands.
Not so, thank Heaven! But, as regards Beatrice's picture, the incident
suggests a theory which may account for its unutterable grief and
mysterious shadow of guilt, without detracting from the purity which we
love to attribute to that ill-fated girl. Who, indeed, can look at that
mouth,--with its lips half apart, as innocent as a babe's that has been
crying, and not pronounce Beatrice sinless? It was the intimate
consciousness of her father's sin that threw its shadow over her, and
frightened her into a remote and inaccessible region, where no sympathy
could come. It was the knowledge of Miriam's guilt that lent the same
expression to Hilda's face.
But Hilda nervously moved her chair, so that the images in the glass
should be no longer Visible. She now watched a speck of sunshine that
came through a shuttered window, and crept from object to object,
indicating each with a touch of its bright finger, and then letting them
all vanish successively. In like manner her mind, so like sunlight in its
natural cheerfulness, went from thought to thought, but found nothing that
it could dwell upon for comfort. Never before had this young, energetic,
active spirit known what it is to be despondent. It was the unreality of
the world that made her so. Her dearest friend, whose heart seemed the
most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions, had no existence for her
any more; and in that dreary void, out of which Miriam had disappeared,
the substance, the truth, the integrity of life, the motives of effort,
the joy of success, had departed along with her.
It was long past noon, when a step came up the staircase. It had passed
beyond the limits where there was communication with the lower regions of
the palace, and was mounting the successive flights which led only to
Hilda's precincts. Faint as the tread was, she heard and recognized it.
It startled her into sudden life. Her first impulse was to spring to the
door of the studio, and fasten it with lock and bolt. But a second
thought made her feel that this would be an unworthy cowardice, on her own
part, and also that Miriam- only yesterday her closest friend had a right
to be told, face to face, that thenceforth they must be forever strangers.
She heard Miriam pause, outside of the door. We have already seen what
was the latter's resolve with respect to any kiss or pressure of the hand
between Hilda and herself. We know not what became of the resolution. As
Miriam was of a highly impulsive character, it may have vanished at the
first sight of Hilda; but, at all events, she appeared to have dressed
herself up in a garb of sunshine, and was disclosed, as the door swung
open, in all the glow of her remarkable beauty. The truth was, her heart
leaped conclusively towards the only refuge that it had, or hoped. She
forgot, just one instant, all cause for holding herself aloof. Ordinarily
there was a certain reserve in Miriam's demonstrations of affection, in
consonance with the delicacy of her friend. To-day, she opened her arms
to take Hilda in.
"Dearest, darling Hilda!" she exclaimed. "It gives me new life to see
you!"
Hilda was standing in the middle of the room. When her friend made a
step or two from the door, she put forth her hands with an involuntary
repellent gesture, so expressive that Miriam at once felt a great chasm
opening itself between them two. They might gaze at one another from the
opposite side, but without the possibility of ever meeting more; or, at
least, since the chasm could never be bridged over, they must tread the
whole round of Eternity to meet on the other side. There was even a
terror in the thought of their meeting again. It was as if Hilda or
Miriam were dead, and could no longer hold intercourse without violating a
spiritual law.
Yet, in the wantonness of her despair, Miriam made one more step towards
the friend whom she had lost. "Do not come nearer, Miriam!" said Hilda.
Her look and tone were those of sorrowful entreaty, and yet they
expressed a kind of confidence, as if the girl were conscious of a
safeguard that could not be violated.
"What has happened between us, Hilda?" asked Miriam. "Are we not
friends?"
"No, no!" said Hilda, shuddering.
"At least we have been friends," continued Miriam. "I loved you dearly!
I love you still! You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than
sisters of the same blood; for you and I were so lonely, Hilda, that the
whole world pressed us together by its solitude and strangeness. Then,
will you not touch my hand? Am I not the same as yesterday?"
"Alas! no, Miriam!" said Hilda.
"Yes, the same, the same for you, Hilda," rejoined her lost friend. "Were
you to touch my hand, you would find it as warm to your grasp as ever. If
you were sick or suffering, I would watch night and day for you. It is in
such simple offices that true affection shows itself; and so I speak of
them. Yet now, Hilda, your very look seems to put me beyond the limits of
human kind!"
"It is not I, Miriam," said Hilda; "not I that have done this."
"You, and you only, Hilda," replied Miriam, stirred up to make her own
cause good by the repellent force which her friend opposed to her. "I am
a woman, as I was yesterday; endowed with the same truth of nature, the
same warmth of heart, the same genuine and earnest love, which you have
always known in me. In any regard that concerns yourself, I am not
changed. And believe me, Hilda, when a human being has chosen a friend
out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves,
rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in
severing the bond. Have I deceived you? Then cast me off! Have I
wronged you personally? Then forgive me, if you can. But, have I sinned
against God and man, and deeply sinned? Then be more my friend than ever,
for I need you more."
"Do not bewilder me thus, Miriam!" exclaimed Hilda, who had not forborne
to express, by look and gesture, the anguish which this interview
inflicted on her. "If I were one of God's angels, with a nature incapable
of stain, and garments that never could be spotted, I would keep ever at
your side, and try to lead you upward. But I am a poor, lonely girl, whom
God has set here in an evil world, and given her only a white robe, and
bid her wear it back to Him, as white as when she put it on. Your
powerful magnetism would be too much for me. The pure, white atmosphere,
in which I try to discern what things are good and true, would be
discolored. And therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I mean to put
faith in this awful heartquake which warns me henceforth to avoid you."
"Ah, this is hard! Ah, this is terrible!" murmured Miriam, dropping her
forehead in her hands. In a moment or two she looked up again, as pale as
death, but with a composed countenance: "I always said, Hilda, that you
were merciless; for I had a perception of it, even while you loved me best.
You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and therefore you are
so terribly severe! As an angel, you are not amiss; but, as a human
creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you need a sin to
soften you."
"God forgive me," said Hilda, "if I have said a needlessly cruel word!"
"Let it pass," answered Miriam; "I, whose heart it has smitten upon,
forgive you. And tell me, before we part forever, what have you seen or
known of me, since we last met?"
"A terrible thing, Miriam," said Hilda, growing paler than before.
"Do you see it written in my face, or painted in my eyes?" inquired
Miriam, her trouble seeking relief in a half-frenzied raillery. "I would
fain know how it is that Providence, or fate, brings eye-witnesses to
watch us, when we fancy ourselves acting in the remotest privacy. Did all
Rome see it, then? Or, at least, our merry company of artists? Or is it
some blood-stain on me, or death-scent in my garments? They say that
monstrous deformities sprout out of fiends, who once were lovely angels.
Do you perceive such in me already? Tell me, by our past friendship, Hilda,
all you know."
Thus adjured, and frightened by the wild emotion which Miriam could not
suppress, Hilda strove to tell what she had witnessed.
"After the rest of the party had passed on, I went back to speak to you,"
she said; "for there seemed to be a trouble on your mind, and I wished to
share it with you, if you could permit me. The door of the little
courtyard was partly shut; but I pushed it open, and saw you within, and
Donatello, and a third person, whom I had before noticed in the shadow of
a niche. He approached you, Miriam. You knelt to him! I saw Donatello
spring upon him! I would have shrieked, but my throat was dry. I would
have rushed forward, but my limbs seemed rooted to the earth. It was like
a flash of lightning. A look passed from your eyes to Donatello's--a
look"--"Yes, Hilda, yes!" exclaimed Miriam, with intense eagerness. "Do
not pause now! That look?"
"It revealed all your heart, Miriam," continued Hilda, covering her eyes
as if to shut out the recollection; "a look of hatred, triumph, vengeance,
and, as it were, joy at some unhoped-for relief."
"Ah! Donatello was right, then," murmured Miriam, who shook throughout
all her frame. "My eyes bade him do it! Go on, Hilda."
"It all passed so quickly, all like a glare of lightning," said Hilda,
"and yet it seemed to me that Donatello had paused, while one might draw a
breath. But that look! Ah, Miriam, spare me. Need I tell more?"
"No more; there needs no more, Hilda," replied Miriam, bowing her head, as
if listening to a sentence of condemnation from a supreme tribunal. "It
is enough! You have satisfied my mind on a point where it was greatly
disturbed. Henceforward I shall be quiet. Thank you, Hilda."
She was on the point of departing, but turned back again from the
threshold.
"This is a terrible secret to be kept in a young girl's bosom," she
observed; "what will you do with it, my poor child?"
"Heaven help and guide me," answered Hilda, bursting into tears; "for the
burden of it crushes me to the earth! It seems a crime to know of such a
thing, and to keep it to myself. It knocks within my heart continually,
threatening, imploring, insisting to be let out! O my mother!--my mother!
Were she yet living, I would travel over land and sea to tell her this
dark secret, as I told all the little troubles of my infancy. But I am
alone--alone! Miriam, you were my dearest, only friend. Advise me what
to do."
This was a singular appeal, no doubt, from the stainless maiden to the
guilty woman, whom she had just banished from her heart forever. But it
bore striking testimony to the impression which Miriam's natural
uprightness and impulsive generosity had made on the friend who knew her
best; and it deeply comforted the poor criminal, by proving to her that
the bond between Hilda and herself was vital yet.
As far as she was able, Miriam at once responded to the girl's cry for
help.
"If I deemed it good for your peace of mind," she said, "to bear testimony
against me for this deed in the face of all the world, no consideration of
myself should weigh with me an instant. But I believe that you would
find no relief in such a course. What men call justice lies chiefly in
outward formalities, and has never the close application and fitness that
would be satisfactory to a soul like yours. I cannot be fairly tried and
judged before an earthly tribunal; and of this, Hilda, you would perhaps
become fatally conscious when it was too late. Roman justice, above all
things, is a byword. What have you to do with it? Leave all such
thoughts aside! Yet, Hilda, I would not have you keep my secret imprisoned
in your heart if it tries to leap out, and stings you, like a wild,
venomous thing, when you thrust it back again. Have you no other friend,
now that you have been forced to give me up?"
"No other," answered Hilda sadly.
"Yes; Kenyon!" rejoined Miriam.
"He cannot be my friend," said Hilda, "because--because--I have fancied
that he sought to be something more."
"Fear nothing!" replied Miriam, shaking her head, with a strange smile.
"This story will frighten his new-born love out of its little life, if
that be what you wish. Tell him the secret, then, and take his wise and
honorable counsel as to what should next be done. I know not what else to
say."
"I never dreamed," said Hilda,--"how could you think it?--of betraying you
to justice. But I see how it is, Miriam. I must keep your secret, and
die of it, unless God sends me some relief by methods which are now beyond
my power to imagine. It is very dreadful. Ah! now I understand how the
sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin for those that
follow. While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each
innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed,
Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!"
Poor Hilda turned from her unhappy friend, and, sinking on her knees in a
corner of the chamber, could not be prevailed upon to utter another word.
And Miriam, with a long regard from the threshold, bade farewell to this
doves' nest, this one little nook of pure thoughts and innocent
enthusiasms, into which she had brought such trouble. Every crime
destroys more Edens than our own!
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of "The Marble Faun, Volume 1"
by Hawthorne.